Election night, Grant Park, among the unticketed masses. The awe is palpable; most can’t find the words, even those who sling them for a living. Then the speech, on the monitor, clearly visible and audible for all. Cell-phone cameras light up the sky like candles. Nearby, a trio of burly men, in matching short locs and baggy Obama t-shirts with “YES WE DID!!” on the back, listen intently, like parishioners in a South Side church, calling back to the President-Elect, “One Nation!” A few yards away, the statue of Abraham Lincoln, almost unnoticed, silently whispers “amen.”
Audience choice: Election night speech in Grant Park
Audience Comments: “Hello Chicago!”; “‘terrorist’ fist bump”;“Bowling and ending up with a worse score than I’d get”; “Dancing with Ellen Degeneres: Finally, a president who can dance!!”; “I met him in a parking lot at 47th street, in the late 1990s, when he was first running for office and I thought he was too skinny and civilized to get anywhere in Chicago politics”; “when he was on ‘Check, Please’: it never aired”;“January 20, 2009.”
