Despite my intense hatred for Donald, I’m not one to turn down the opportunity to wear a long dress and drink Dom Perignon all night. So when my uncle offered me an extra ticket to the Texas inaugural ball, appropriately themed “Black Tie and Boots”, I headed down south for one the most bizarre experiences of my life.
8:00 pm: There I found myself, waiting for my Uncle’s friend to come pick us up in a 14–person Hummer limo, stocked with $9,000 worth of champagne in the custom–made coolers he had installed in the car before the event. The friend, Tom, calls my Uncle before arriving and says, “We’re parking in front of the house. Tell the neighbors fuck the EPA!”
9:30 pm: My 55 year–old mom and I adopt the persona of Texas–obsessed binge drinkers who toast to “Making America Great Again!” and joke that Veuve is for the commoners. I catch myself requesting for the ‘95 and not the ‘98, momentarily forgetting the fact that I downed a bottle of Yellow Tail the night before and thought it was delicious. I may have even used the word "oaky."
9:55 pm: My thought process varies along the lines of “Okay, this 14–person limo is excessive, there are literally six of us”, and, “I didn’t know 50 year olds could still get fucked up like this.” But I can't blame anyone for excessively drinking for this event. Especially after I entered.
10:00 pm: I walk into the venue, and it's the grimmest place I could possibly imagine: like I'm entering a convention center in the middle of Kansas for a lecture on how climate change does not exist. The line for the bar wraps around the corner of the ballroom where The Beach Boys attempt to perform some song no one knows.
11:30 pm: At this point in the night, I've lost my mother. Not surprisingly, I find her by the understocked curdled queso and chip buffet table. She's sporting a “USA” hat and carrying five Trump shirts she's confiscated from the souvenir station. Yes, apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, but this is where I drew the line.
The night ends in a natural and unpredictable succession: everyone fifty and older wants to go to a “fun bar downtown”, and I want to go home and sleep. After one too many time stalls from drunk cig smoking sessions, we all stumble into the Hummer, trying to not reflect on the night’s events. Why I thought Beyonce was going to be at this event, no one will know. But the experience was sobering nonetheless.
I saw things I didn’t know existed in our country (cue embellished belt buckle with a cow carved into it), and I saw them in mass quantities. As a liberal and Hillary supporter, I felt like I had a secret that no one else could know. I watched the other side from the inside.
Photo credit: Creative Commons
