Election Day 2008

Thirsty again. What is going on with me being so thirsty all the time?

I must have fallen asleep watching a movie channel last night because as soon I turned on the set this morning there was Ethel Merman, she of the belting, bulldozer vocals, singing to the rafters. This is Call Me Madam, a 20th Century Fox musical from 1953 in which Merman plays American ambassador Sally Adams, and if you look close and don’t blink you’ll also see Lois Maxwell, better known on this side of the pond as Moneypenny in the first (and best) of the Bond movies, in a tiny role as a singing receptionist (or something like that). Call Me Madam is not to my taste first rank as Golden Era musicals go, but it’s pleasant enough. Donald O’Connor woos European princess Vera-Ellen in this one and they are a cute couple—and superb dancers—but their supposedly star-crossed love affair leaves me…well, not cold exactly. Tepid, more like. Audrey Hepburn and Greg Peck in Roman Holiday—now there’s your heartbreaker romance. Personally I think Vera-Ellen had loads more chemistry with Danny Kaye in White Christmas. I do find Ethel Merman and the acerbic George Sanders a hoot and a half as the other romantic pairing in Madam. Sanders would probably rather have been romancing the prissy Billy DeWolfe (or one of cute chorus boys, more like) than the brassy Hostess With The Mostess On The Mall.

It took close to two hours but I cast my Ballot for Barack this morning. Now all I have to do is stay the hell away from all news outlets and threaten with bodily harm any friends, family or coworkers who attempts to share exit polling numbers with me. I don’t want to hear squat about exit polls, people, I want hard numbers and I can wait until this time tomorrow if need be to get them. Leave us not forget that exit polls projected Kerry the winner in Election 2004 and Gore the winner in 2000, the Year of Great Debacle.

I live in a senior retirement complex with my mom and so was able to vote in my pjs this morning (what? I wore a robe, too) in the polling place set up on the second floor of this tower. I brought with me an interesting book about fear, but kept putting it down to look around, shift in my seat and grumble a bit at the goings-on. Though mine was not the nightmare wait others have endured, patience was the key as it was a sloooow process. Even arriving early (or so I thought) I stepped off the elevator to encounter a line so long it snaked around to parts of the building I didn’t know existed. (We have a movie theater room here? With comfy chairs and cup holders? When was somebody going to tell me??!) The line moved fairly quickly (my younger legs would consider 40 minutes “fairly quickly”; I suspect my mother felt differently) but the bottle-necking began when the Board of Election workers—were these volunteers?—began passing out to each of us who had reached a certain point in the wait little squares of paper with numbers on them, to keep track of who needed to sign in and who was next in line for the next available voting machine, only to wind up having to canvass the groups, calling the same numbers over and over again, to track people down. There were a lot of seniors waiting to vote, some in wheelchairs, some balancing shakily on walkers and canes, and as far as I could tell some of them were pocketing the paper squares and either forgetting which number they’d been given or forgetting they’d been given a number in the first place. They’d just sit there as their number was called, needing to be prodded back to consciousness by the person next to them—I did this twice.

Adding to the bog down was that percentage of younger people who apparently had never voted before (or hadn’t in many years) and needed assistance with the machines, refusing to move forward until they’d been rescued by someone who knew what to do, this in spite of the fact that there were big, bright “voting instruction” signs all over the place, most of them directly behind the ballot booths and voting machines. I heard around me a lot of anxiety-tinged jokes about wanting to vote for Obama and being afraid of mistakenly casting the vote for McCain.

And I watched some idiot girl actually taking an incoming cell phone call while she marked off her ballot. Jesus Christ. My people.