TL;DR Convention was awesome.
Pardon the delay in posting, I have been stuck to my couch with the world's worst sinus infection of all time, taking antibiotic pills the size of Zachary's head and sleeping. I barely had the energy to speak let alone write you all the awesome stuff that I just finished doing in Philly.
But HEY! I am here now and have SO MUCH to tell you about my time working the convention in Philadelphia. In fact, I am gonna be posting about it all week. GET PUMPED, all four of you and my mom! HI MOM!
I suppose we should start somewhere and I guess that somewhere is what the fuck I was actually doing working the convention, what that means and how I got to do it in the first place.
What was I doing?
I was working on the women's caucus. You might think of the convention as the stuff you watch each night during the week. The big speeches, the balloons, the totally awesome musical guests, but the convention is actually an all day thing with lots of moving parts and events. The part I worked was during the day, in the convention center. In fact, I slept in my own bed each night, woke up at 3:30 am and was down in Philly by 5 am to beat the traffic and was out of town by 3 pm in order to get out before rush hour. So, I watched the night time fun on tv just like you!
During the day, the convention center was home to meetings of the various smaller identity groups within the Democratic party. The black, gay, native, jewish, disability, labor, hispanic, AAIP and women's caucuses just to name a few. Each group gets two days and two hours within those days to meet and panel and discuss and what not. It usually ends up being a rally of some kind with famous folks from each identity speaking on issues important to those groups. (Think Rev. Jesse Jackson at the Black caucus, Cecile Richards and Leader Nancy Pelosi at the women's caucus, etc.)
My job was to manage the stage at the women's caucus. This means that I manage who gets on the stage to speak and when they do that. This is important because even though you have a set schedule and speaking order, sometimes important people are early or running late or someone you were not expecting shows up. This is stressful and exciting and usually works out but you definitely get yelled at by 2-6 people by the time it is all over.
I was asked to help out by a good friend and former colleague and since I ran the Women's Caucus in Denver in 2008 for Mame Reiley, I had experience and was asked to help out.
So, there you go. Some background. In my next post, I intend to give you my top 10 moments from the convention and then, follow that with a post reflection on my experience.
Stay tuned!