E-Mail This Article to a Friend A funny thing happened on the way to the Convention BY CHRIS WRIGHT

TUESDAY, July 27, 2004 -- Actually, a funny thing happened at the convention.

A colleague and I had spent something like seven hours trying to find the area our passes provided access to. "Walk three miles south-south-west," various volunteers would say. "Take stairway xy(~99.BQ) up to the seventh floor, make 13 right turns, go back down to the fourth floor and get in the service elevators...." Actually, they were indeed making people get in these large, servicey elevators, along with carts filled with black trash bags. The atmosphere in the elevators was thick with perspiration, and TV cameras jabbed you in the spleen. Not that anyone was complaining. The wait for the elevators was long enough that one media type spat out, "Five more minutes and we’re leaving." Cake make-up, let me tell you, does not look so pretty under these circumstances.

But that wasn’t the funny part.

My colleague and I had been loitering close to the door that allowed one access to the convention floor, when she pointed out a well-groomed man wearing a stars-and-stripes tie. "I think that’s Tom Daschle," she said. The guy did seem familiar, in a vague, Daschle-like way. Much to the man’s discomfort, my colleague and I stood and stared while he shook hands with well-wishers. "That’s Daschle, right?" she said. Wrong. It was Fred Willard, the comedic actor from Best In Show. I approached Willard and told him my colleague’s mistake, thinking he’d be amused by it, but he just stared at me blankly. "Oh," he said finally, "I was just talking to the South Dakota people."

Like I said, a funny thing.

On the way to the Fleet Center, on the Green Line, a young guy who was patently high as a B-2 bomber nodded in and out of a coma-like slumber. At one point, he pulled out a little plastic box that said "Daily Dose" on it and attempted to count the orange pills within. Later, an old woman shuffled along Portland Street, near the Fleet, muttering something about "secret ballots." Similarly, a lone protester stood in the so-called Internment Camp and barked protest to a crowd of two. Things had been much livelier earlier, as members of the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Kansas, stood on the little stage and sang the "Star Spangled Banner."

The WBC had earlier issued a press release announcing its plans to "picket the vile sodomite orgy" that is the DNC. The release also bemoaned the fact that Kerry and Edwards "look like a pair of fags in heat." On the stage, a pair of middle-aged women with flecks of white at the corners of their mouths sang heartily while carrying signs that read "God Hates Fags" and "Thank God For 9/11." Beside them stood a beefy guy in shades and a Yankees cap, and behind him were three pre-teen boys, also carrying signs. The WBC’s aging patriach, Fred Phelps, looked on with an expression that suggested a stroke was imminent. I told the WBC people, in no uncertain terms, that I disapproved of their message, and one of the women responded with, "Just because you’ve been getting fucked up the ass since you were three."

Funny stuff.

Later, I went to the Tom Daschle party at Anthem, which was filled with attractive young political types, including a woman from Arkansas who admitted to being addicted to her Blackberry (or "crackberry"). The woman also claimed to have first-hand knowledge about Clinton’s weight-loss secret (the South Beach Diet — shhh!). "Where the fuck’s Daschle!?" asked one attendee. Nobody knew. Outside, toward the end of the night, a reporter from the Washington Post complained that the police weren’t heavily armed enough. "A service revolver’s not going to stop anyone." This called to mind an exchange I’d had with a DNC volunteer earlier. The woman had told me that to get to the Fleet, which was directly across the street from where I stood, I’d need to negotiate an interminable route that would lead me around the black, steel-grate barriers that blocked my path. "Can’t I just climb over?" I’d asked. "Sure," she said. "If you want to get shot."

By the time I’d made that long walk for the fifth or sixth time, I was thinking of taking my chances.