Two late-breaking Ted Kennedy-related memories.
The night after Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama for president, I had a very high-stakes date with a woman that was wildly out of my league. I checked in with Herbach beforehand (high-stakes dates aren’t any fun unless you’ve made arrangements to tell someone afterwards how badly they went), and showed him I was wearing a “KENNEDY ‘80” pinback on my lapel to be sure I had the full primal force of the Kennedies at my back. Herbach was already ecstatic about Teddy’s endorsement, so he proceeded to give me one of the greatest pep talks I have ever received from anyone. “I know he’d also endorse you, should this delicious woman want something in writing — and if that is something she desires,” he sputtered, building to a Kennedyesque crescendo of sheer liberal exuberance, “we will drive to Hyannis Port tonight!”
I still think of that rallying cry — we will drive to Hyannis Port tonight! — in similar moments of personal exuberance. I suppose it is my own private version of “the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”
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A weeknight at Nye’s Polonaise, during the Republican Convention. As with most bars around the cities at that time, Republican delegates had completely taken over the place — assholes in cowboy boots, wall-to-wall. I decided it was time to do my civic duty by letting the fuckers know they’d picked the wrong night to ruin my favorite Polish piano lounge. I downed a shot of bourbon at the bar and marched over to the piano player, who was taking requests from patrons wishing to sing old standards as he played. “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” I snarled. He nodded uneasily as I picked up the mic. “This number goes out to alla you Western delegates,” I spat out as the piano player started, and I tore into the first verse in my best Johnny Cash vibrato. Except I changed the words from “ghost riders in the sky” to “Ted Kennedy in the sky” — painting a hellish vision of thundering liberal retribution, raining down on the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. “A bolt of fear went through them as he thundered through the sky / For they saw Teddy comin’ hard, and they heard his mournful cry.”
But none of the delegates noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t care. They just kept drinking.
(September 9, 2009)
NOTES: This was originally posted a few days following Senator Kennedy’s death on August 25. A reader asked me later how the “high-stakes date” went. In true Teddy form, it went like this: I won primaries in several key states, but was blasted for giving a “repetitive and incoherent” answer to the question of why I was interested in the nomination, and was then decisively routed in key primaries leading up the convention. Actually, in retrospect, I think there’s probably something a little creepy about wearing a Ted Kennedy button on a date, especially when you’re picking that date up in a car and driving them around. Still, she didn’t seem to mind, and for a few months — before my poll numbers started their precipitous decline — it looked like I had the nomination sewn up.
