August 15, 1996
laura's data entry gossip newsletter
Special Edition Volume 3, #3
Well even though Ted Koppel has packed up and left the convention because it is worthless and boring, I found last nite's to be sort of exciting for 2 main reasons. And not because of football. Which was mentioned about 60 million times, every time some symbolic importance guy or token woman or person of color would give their announcement of all or most of their votes for BobDole, they also tended to mention how happy they were about 1. BobDole's tax cuts, these big fantasy tax cuts that even a 10 year old like the one at my house questions and said How Could Those Work? and 2. their home football team and how it would either win the super bowl or how it won the super bowl once, or how it had had Jack Kemp as it's quarterback at one time or another. And since my interest in football is pretty much limited to the cheerleading, and since once i had a studio for a few months about 50 feet away from where the Arizona Football teams played and it was pretty much impossible to work there on the weekends because of the tailgaters parked like 3 feet outside my windows grilling burgers on little grills and throwing beer cans at my wall, this was all pretty repetitive.
So that wasn't what held my interest. The first thing that did was that I found out the secret of who makes the homemade signs! (See LDEGNL Special Edition #2) It is the congressional pages, and C-SPAN did an exciting interview with them on Wednsday afternoon. It seems these young republicans apply to be underpaid slaves for their congress people and to volunteer to work at the convention, and it's a great honor and thousands of people apply and only 250 are selected.
So they put all of these pages in a big room one day with lots of white posterboards and blue and red paint and let them get crazy and creative and these attractive signs are what they came up with. They had to rush and do the Kemp ones at the last minute in San Diego. That was surely extra crazy. Then their job at the convention is to go around and make sure all the signs that would say Iowa Loves Dole are in the Iowa delegate section and so forth, and that everyone has access to a sign.
The pages are sort of on permanent dress down friday compared to everyone else at the convention, which they probably like except maybe they don't, maybe it makes them feel unclean i was thinking, which i'm sure republican's don't like to feel. But the pages interviewed had on blue sport coats, and the girl one had on a khaki mini skirt and white reeboks that were really really white, and instead of the patterened tie she had a patterned scarf done all 80's Oprah style folded across herself and the boy page had on Dockers. I don't think they are allowed to wear sparkly sequin vests or hats. Except for maybe when they go to Planet Hollywood or SeaWorld.
The other thing that was exciting at the convention was when I had on the KQED coverage, the camera flashed on an actual celebrity, the first one I saw at the convention, since Chris Darden got cancelled out from his speech and I'm sure didn't go he was so insulted. It was Rachel from the Real World, the one who lived in SF and got a tatoo and took her roomates to a republican function and dated bike messengers. According to alt.tv.real_world she goes to UC San Diego now, so it was probably real convinient for her to go there and all, although you never would have caught her in some bad patterned scarf and khaki miniskirt with sneakers outfit hauling signs around, or probably even at Planet Hollywood.
And then that reminded me that I hadn't seen any of this seasons Real World goes to Miami and becomes venture capitalists so I watched that instead of the conventions at 10. I only saw Liddy Dole's cute wife thing on the news later, and I was surprised that she didn't have an Andrew Lloyd Webber score to go with her speech because it looked like she was ready to break into song at any time, kind of like those bad singing talk shows that they used to have a long time ago. It would have been better if they had had actual football players and actors dressed like dead military heros sitting around and she could have sat on their laps and sang about her husband. Maybe Ted Koppel would have stayed if she had done that. I wonder if Robin Dole has ever thought about killing Liddy.
Hey don't forget to visit Margaret Crane and Jon Winet's website which is the whole reason I started watching these conventions anyways, it's at http://www.pair.xerox.com/cw and you can reach it via mac now, in case you tried and it took forever to load and java hates your mac.