Obama's Inaugural

I didn't take this picture from my cell phone. Allison Price, former Western Pa press spokeswoman for Barack Obama's campaign, did. Allison, who I am still in touch with, posted this photo on her facebook page and I pilfered it. Thanks, Allison!

I was too busy back at the Lincoln Memorial shooting video... which I never was able to send due to technical difficulties... to take still pictures of what was going on around me. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I went down to Washington on Friday, Jan. 16, after finishing two preview stories and flying out the door into single digit temperatures... It was COLD..... the snow blowing across the fields as I drove into the Laurel Highlands. But I had Gabriel Faure's Requiem playing on my Mp3... and when I heard the exquisite, ethereal final movement -- "In Paradisum" -- all my anxieties about the challenges of the upcoming week melted away. I think music has that affect on me... whenever I get nervous about an assignment, I just put on some Ravel or Chopin and I'm fine.

You can listen to Kings College Choir of Cambridge's version of "In Paradisum" here.

D.C., thankfully, was warmer than Pittsburgh... I arrived at Rebecca Trafton Frischkorn's fabulous Washington apartment that evening, and after some social time with the dear girl and her great and good friend Dodge and a few others, collapsed into bed.

Here's a photograph from my BlackBerry of lovely Becky/Rebecca the next morning, sipping cappucino made FROM HER OWN MACHINE:














And here's a photograph(below) of what she USED to look like, back in Wyonegonic days. She's the little girl on the far left, deeply immersed in sewing something on her teddy bear -- or at least PRETENDING to, for the photographer.... I actually remember when they made us pose for those pictures. I think I'm at the table but obscured by the girl in the white headband (sigh).















Oh, wait... I was supposed to be writing about the 2008 presidential Inaugural, not Wyonegonic camp, circa 1963. But it's late and I will write more about my incredible adventures tomorrow....

SUNDAY JAN. 25th...

Okay, where was I? Oh, yes. Here's a picture of your correspondent, blogging and bleary eyed, the next morning (Saturday, Jan. 17) in Rebecca's apartment (actually POSTING TO THE BLOG is a more correct way to put it, I've been told... in this case to the "Early Returns" blog). You can read some of the blog postings here and here and here and here and here and here and here
and here.

That Saturday was spent gallivanting around visiting old friends while posting to "Early Returns" which is mostly a product of my colleague Tim McNulty (who also writes great pieces like this on about Steelers Nation ) but since it was the weekend, I was on duty. Maybe it was crazy, or rude, or both, but I was tethered to my laptop, posting things that I found on the Internet that I thought might be relevant to our readers. We don't always do original reporting on blogs; we serve as aggregators -- hunting down interesting fragments of information and color that might otherwise get lost in the blogosphere...

Then it was on to Dad-and-Ele's apartment, just a a short ride away. D&E were a Godsend on this trip... they not only gave me a free place to sleep, and free food, but free parking in their apartment building with AN AUTOMATIC GARAGE DOOR OPENER!!!!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank D&E -- there they are in a photo from Thanksgiving a few years ago, with my husband, Gary Rotstein. And props to you too, Gary, for holding down the fort while I was gone.

At any rate, after depositing bags in D&E's apartment, it was time to head to the Walter Washington Convention Center to pick up media credentials: a mission undertaken with some dread, given the talk of traffic gridlock.

It was not to be: there was a parking spot right in front of the Convention Center, and after being ushered through four security checkpoints, I found myself in media credential land. As there were NO OTHER REPORTERS there... the Inaugural volunteers actually seemed glad to see me. They gave me a packet of credentials, some hand-warmers, which would prove INVALUABLE, and I was outta there.

Then it was time to visit Jayne Clark, the lovely, effervescent, tart-tongued travel writer for USAToday:








She was battling a cold but received me graciously in her charming little Georgetown house and allowed me to post to my blog in her living room while she tended to some family business. Then we headed over to her colleague, USAToday columnist Craig Wilson's equally charming Georgetown house. Here's a picture of Craig from USAToday:





There, we had drinks with him, his supernice partner Jack (who works in health care statistics and probably contributes far more to society than I ever will) and Olivia Barker, another extremely nice USAToday reporter. Is all this friendliness a USAToday thing? Sure, we talked about how the troubled newspaper industry, but generally, the mood was cheery and even a bit riotous... as it will be when reporters get together to gossip.

The next day, Sunday, it was up bright and early to meet PG columnist Tony Norman in front of the Georgetown Starbucks to head over to Capitol Hill to pick up yet more media credentials. Tony has been to DC before but I drove him around a bunch of neighborhoods he'd never seen, to help him get the lay of the land. Again, despite all the dire predictions, Capitol Hill on Sunday morning was empty too. I ventured into the Russell Senate Office Building, where I'd spent so much time as a young aspiring field producer for public television, and again, I was the only print reporter in line for credentials.

















Of course, all of this quiescence wouldn't last... I gather it was bedlam up there on Tuesday... but I wasn't to see it, since I was down at the other end of the National Mall, thank goodness. More on that later.

After dropping Tony off near DuPont Circle, I headed over to the Washington Hilton to cover the wild n' crazy Emily's List lunch for Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, et al.



There, I ran into my old colleague, former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette summer intern Indira Lakshmanan, now, after a distinguished career as a foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe, the diplomatic correspondent for Bloomberg. I've run into her a few times on the campaign trail... she is delightful. We sat in the back of the room and laughed hysterically when U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore banged her high heeled shoe on the podium to emphasize a point.

I filed a breaking news story about the lunch for the Web, and, later, a more polished print version. But, I have to confess, a far better piece on this event was penned by Salon's Rebecca Traister. She said everything I wish I could have said -- but I had only 12 inches allotted to my story, after all...

Sigh.

That evening it was out to dinner with D&E and Aunt Anne, at DeCarlo's, a terrific restaurant in Spring Valley. We had a great time. I felt so blessed to be spending time with them, especially since all three are the liveliest, most acerbic, most fun dinner partners you could ask for -- and they don't mind if you steal bites of their dessert!!!!

More later.

Going to the Inaugural

I am headed to Washington, D.C. this afternoon for five days... to cover Barack Obama's Inaugural. Let's hope I don't encounter this scene along the way. But I probably will, so I might as well just relax and enjoy the experience. This whole year has been so extraordinary.

Tonight, I will be staying with my dear childhood friend Rebecca Frischkorn. We've known each other since we were nine years old, at Wyonegonic Camp in Maine, when she was Becky Trafton (tall, strong, a true leader) and I was Kenzie Carpenter (short, pesky, and a chatterbox).

We will probably spend the evening singing camp songs together from memory. I will post a photo of us from those days when I get a chance.

Today, Rebecca is an accomplished garden designer, writer and lecturer and host of the acclaimed PBS series, GardenStory.

Isn't she beautiful in this picture?

Kitchens R Us

My sister called me up today and harangued me for not posting photos of my kitchen. Well, in one last act of procrastination before going back to finishing a story about the Obamas, here they are.

It's a pretty unfancy kitchen... the chairs are mismatched, painted in different shades of pale green, lime, celery... and the countertops aren't granite, but what the heck, it's like a palace to me... I especially love the old pine table we found 20 years ago at an outdoor antiques fair in southern Massachesetts. My only splurge: pale green glass drawer pulls from Restoration Hardware... (will post those after I take a picture of them).

Back to work!!!!

Go Steelers N@

I'm feeling great about Pittsburgh today, even if it is 12 degrees out. The Steelers are playing in the AFC championships, Pitt's basketball team is number one in the country, and the Post-Gazette remains a media organization to be reckoned with, even as the newspaper industry crumbles all around us.

Here is a great story in today's Post-Gazette by the great Bill Toland about how great Pittsburgh is...
And here's a link the the New York Times' FRONT PAGE piece the other day on how great (sort of) we are...

design blog madness

Here is a gorgeous blog header to one of my favorite design blogs, mynottinghill.blogspot.com, which I featured in a story in the Post-Gazette today about my secret passion, interior design, and about some fabulous design blogs that my sister alerted me to. You can read about it here. Three of the blog designers hail from the Pittsburgh area, which must tell you something!!!!
And here is a list of fabulous blogs that I referred to in the article:

http://habituallychic.blogspot.com/
http://www.allthebestblog.com/
http://barefootintheorchard.blogspot.com/
http://www.ctcottageindustries.com/
http://www.historical-home.com/
http://londoncallingloudly.blogspot.com/
http://mynottinghill.blogspot.com/2008/12/need-some-christmas-cheer-click-here.html
http://russellversaci.blogspot.com/
http://shelterinteriordesign.blogspot.com/2008/10/feeling-fall-inas-new-digs.html
http://www.smallplacestyle.blogspot.com/
http://brookegiannetti.typepad.com/velvet_and_linen/
http://whiteandwander.blogspot.com/
http://bunnytomerlin.blogspot.com/

Amy Stanley!

We had a visit from the fabulous University of Chicago historian Amy Dru Stanley, her husband Craig Becker and their adorable boys, Tom and Isaac, who stopped overnight with us on their way to Washington D.C. I've known her since she was in 9th grade and I was in 11th grade and she was hanging out with my sister Camilla and at the Williamses' house et cetera... I have an elegant side table that I call the "Amy Stanley memorial table" because my little sister Sophie carved Amy's name in it -- probably because she was mad at Camilla for some reason and wanted to get her in trouble.

Flash forward many years later: When I was covering election day in Chicago, Amy took me all around Hyde Park, to Obama's polling place, past Bill Ayers house, past Obama's house, etc etc and in short was just tremendously helpful. I wrote a breaking news story later that morning in her kitchen and quoted her, which was fun. I should probably send it to the PDS alumni weekly: one PDS grad interviews another!

Great Rooms

News flash: As I slide into my dotage, my interior design style is evolving.

I used to prefer the spare and the pale, and still do love it... in my living room, for example, featuring Aunt Anne's childhood writing desk and two prints I bought from my friend Jane Roesch at her exquisite antique shop, Merrivale Antiques, years ago...

More globally, here's British designer/aesthete David Mlinaric's exquisite London dining room, courtesy of the fabulous HabituallyChic.com blog... tranquility, defined.
BUT...

I also find myself drawn to that particularly British phenomenon, the Great Room/Library... there's more clutter here, to be sure, but there's something about all those books and paintings and comfortable sofas that just pulls me in and wants me to plant roots. I like warmer colors, too.
Something like this:

This is our dining room -- except when it isn't. Now, it's kind of an all-purpose reading, piano playing, hanging out room... for me, anyway (there's no television so there's not much appeal for the rest of the family). I love a dining room with walls of books... actually, I don't have a WALL of books, alas, but I found a respectable looking bookshelf at Target for $80 which does just fine. See a glimpse through the front hall, below:











Actually, that shelf is twinned with a smaller farmhouse bookshelf in the room. They're not exactly symmetrical, but I don't care, I love their quirky, mismatched quality. Annie's piano doesn't exactly make an elegant decorating statement either, but I love it because it's old (a Wurlitzer, which, it is rumored, once bedecked a dance hall) and she learned to play lovely music on it. The color, a kind of pumpkin, is an experiment for me. I just got tired of pale pink, and so far I like it, although the jury is still out...









On a far grander scale, but nonetheless still inspirational, here is Oscar and Annette de la Renta's Great Room, as designed by Ernesto Buch, in their Connecticut house...

You can look at more pictures of their house here.

John Richardson's library/great room in his country house can't be found online, alas, but I scanned some photos from an old magazine which might give an idea of how alluring that space is:

You can read about Richardson's quest for a similarly comfortable place to work in New York City in a Vanity Fair piece here. Richardson, author of an acclaimed series of biographies on Picasso, didn't have an easy time of it, but oh, to have such problems:

"... the English grainer and marbleizer Malcolm Robson came up from Virginia to glaze the walls with the colors that paint-mixing machines can never approximate. As I had hoped, everything glowed with light, and the spaces opened up into one another as attractively as they would in an 18th-century English country house. Unfortunately, the scale of the layout upstaged my battered bits and pieces of furniture. Nice little Regency tables looked forlorn; everything seemed to have shrunk..."

Then, of course, there's Nancy Lancaster's hugely legendary great room at Ditchley, a room that is a tad grand, perhaps, for my tastes, but oh, to have seen that room, just once (see photo, below).

David Cecil, in his wonderful biography of Lord Melbourne, captures this particular sensibility -- born in the 18th C. -- perfectly:

"The great Whig country houses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are among the most conspicuous monuments of English history. Ornate and massive, with their pedimented porticoes, their spreading balustraded wings, they dominate the landscape around them with a magnificent self-assurance. Nor are their interiors less imposing. Their colonnaded entrance halls, whence the Adam staircase sweeps up beneath a fluted dome; their cream and gilt libraries piled with sumptuous editions of the classics; their orangeries peopled with casts from the antique; their saloons hung with yellow silk, and with ceiling a doorways painted in delicate arabesque by Angelica Kauffmann...

"Yet they are not palaces. There is something easy-going and unofficial about them. Between library and saloon one comes on little rooms, full of sporting prints and comfortable untidiness... even the great rooms themselves, with their roomy writing tables, their armchairs, their tables piled with albums and commonplace books, seem designed less for state occasions than for private life -- for leisure and lounging, for intimate talk and desultory reading. And the portraits that glow down from the walls exhibit a similar character. The gentlemen lean back in their hunting coats, the ladies stroll in their parks with spaniels snapping at the ribbons that dangle from the garden hats slung on their arms. In big and in detail these houses convey an effect of splendid naturalness...

So, you get the general idea. Great rooms are great!