Heroes of the Shutdown (1995 Edition)
Jan. 20th, 2018 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurrWith the 2018 Federal government shutdown careering along, I thought I’d share a treasured old, but true, story.
Carole and I were on our first date on Saturday, December 16, 1995 in downtown Washington, DC — during the 1995 Clinton/Dole/Gingrich shutdown of fond memory. There was nothing else open in DC thanks to the shutdown so we went for a walk around the Mall and Washington Monument and environs.
An ABC TV news crew was there at the Washington Monument interviewing tourists, and since we were just about the only tourists there (except one cranky old guy and a bunch of homeless people) we of course got interviewed. Didn’t know until later that we’d actually been aired as part of that evening’s ABC World News Tonight, but Carole’s dad had set the VCR to record just in case, so that’s why we’ve got the video to share (see below).
I suspect we’re just about the only married couple who can truthfully say that their first date was aired on national television as part of the evening news. We got married in September of 1997 and are still married twenty years (and two more shutdowns) later.
