So, the thing is, I'm going to meet Bill Clinton.
What I mean is that I am going to walk up to a table and hand him a book
and he will sign it and hand it back to me. I'm counting that
as "meeting," and if he even looks me in the eye for half a second,
I cannot imagine how it could be anything other than one of
the coolest freaking moments of my life.
I'm a little excited.
I am going to meet. Bill. CLINTON.
Holy shit.
The story of how this came to be is a little convoluted, so bear with me.
It all started with Alain de Botton, an author who I am seriously considering stalking.
He has a new book out called "Status Anxiety," which could very well end up saving my sanity. I was perusing his website a couple of weeks ago and discovered, much to my joy, that he was going to be doing a booksigning at Politics and Prose, which was last Friday night, and I'll be writing way more about him later, because I am ridiculously obsessed with him. So I clicked over to the bookstore's website to get the information.
As it turns out, they had just announced, that very day, that Bill Clinton was going to be signing books there on July 6th. You had to come to the book launch party on the night of June 21st and buy the book, and when they started handing them out at 12:01 on the 22nd (which was 47 minutes ago as I write this -- I told you, I'm a little excited), they'd give you a line ticket to come back on the 6th and have your book signed. Instead of numbers, they were handing out letters, so if you got an A, you'd be in the first group, and B's would be second, and so on down the line. But they can't guarantee that just because you get a line ticket, you'll have your book signed. If he runs out of time or ink or hand muscle, you'll be out of luck, no matter what letter you have.
Well.
I was so tired today, and it was a lousy day at work, which is not particularly unusual. For most of the afternoon I went back and forth about even trying to go and brave the crowds to get a line ticket that might not even mean anything. But I was walking to the metro with one of my coworkers, and she told me that I had to try, that if I didn't, I'd regret it forever.
And I agreed with her. I read recently that for most people, when they look back on the regrets they have about their lives, they don't regret the things they did do, even if they were mistakes; they regret the things they didn't try to do. I had an opportunity that most people in this country aren't going to have, which is to have a former President of the United States, and one I happen to admire beyond reason, sign a book right in front of me, and if I didn't at least try, who knows if I would ever have that kind of opportunity again.
So I came home, had some dinner and took a nap, and headed to the bookstore around 9:00, thinking that if it was insane, I would just turn around and come home, and at least I would have tried.
There weren't that many people by the time I got there. I mean, it was mildly crowded, and there were maybe fifteen people milling around outside. I went in and prepaid for my book, getting my prized blue voucher, which I would then trade for a book and a line ticket at midnight.
The crappy thing was, they weren't telling anyone where to line up to pick up the books and line tickets. People had staked out places right in front of the boxes of books, which were in the front window, but employees kept coming over the loudspeakers saying things like "If you're lining up in the fiction section, you're going to be disappointed," leading people to speculate whether they were just trying to force people to mill around until 11, when they would finally tell us where to line up.
So I was chilling in the fiction section anyway. I had brought a book and just planned to stand around and read, but of course I started to talk to a couple of people around me in line. The woman right in front of me had been all over the store and had determined that there were no other books stashed anywhere else, and we all agreed that they weren't going to move them before handing them out, so it either had to be in this room or... and here's where light bulbs started to go off... outside.
There was a door next to the front window full of books.
She decided to go check things out, and because I didn't have anything better to do, and it was getting hot inside the store, and she looked pretty smart, I followed her.
So now we're standing outside the store, in front of the window of boxes and the fire door with about ten other people, and we're basically trying to talk ourselves into the fact that this is the only place they could possibly do it. They were expecting upwards of 1000 people, which would violate all kinds of fire safety laws if they had to file through the store, and since we were confident they weren't going to move the books, we decided to take the gamble and stay there.
And the people in line are just a hoot. There's a fifty-ish plastic surgeon from New York. There's a fifty-ish woman who had a little too much of the free wine they were handing out. There's a totally sweet, cute kid in his late 20's with honest-to-God Tourrette's Syndrome (we had been talking for about ten minutes and he was telling us about how he played lacrosse in college and how the helmet kept bruising his face because of it). I don't know, there's something inherently fun about chatting with total strangers.
Now it's 10:30, and people are starting to come up asking if this is the line, and we say we don't know, we're just guessing, but that's good enough for most lemming-minded people, so pretty soon there were probably 100 people in line.
And don't you know it, at about 10:45, bookstore employees started shepherding everyone else right down the block behind us. Our gamble paid off.
Once everyone else started lining up, a few amoral people merged in with us at the front of the line, but I figured they had probably been waiting longer than I had, just in the wrong spot, so it didn't really bother me, except for two girls with their boobs and blonde hair and diet Sierra Mists who muscled in behind me. They were annoying. I expect them to show up on the 6th wearing berets.
(I should mention at this point that there were cameras everywhere. All the local TV stations, radio stations, C-SPAN, some Japanese network. There was a German guy trying to get people to talk into his cellphone. It was madness. They all interviewed the woman at the head of the line, the smart woman I had followed out of the store, and they kept panning around to the rest of us, and I kept turning my back as I had not redone my hair or makeup after my post-work nap, and I figured they'd rather get shots of the bobbleheads behind me anyway.)
Finally, the boxes were ripped open, and we were shepherded one by one up to the table. I handed a guy my magic blue voucher, and he handed me a book with a magic "A" line ticket stuck inside of it. I told my line friends I'd see them on the 6th, and the plastic surgeon promised us lunch at his house after the signing.
So, yeah. Gonna meet Bill Clinton.
I really can't believe how fucking lucky I was. I can't get a job to save my life, but by damn, I ended up in the front of the line simply because I happened to stand next to the smartest woman in the store after I bought my book, and now Bill Clinton is going to handle my book.
I must admit, I did feel a little smug as I walked down the block to my car, past the line of God knows how many people. I actually saw one of the attorneys I work with and showed off my ticket. He jokingly offered me $500 for it.
He could have been serious, and my answer would have been the same:
Not in a million years.
