We don’t look like the winners, Anna and I, sitting in the cold outside City Hall with our sour faces. You could never tell by looking at us that this is the moment we’ve been visualizing for years.
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There’s the mayor and there’s Larry Gorski, the smiling quadriplegic whom the mayor pays $75,000 a year to represent us disabled folk in City Hall as his special assistant. It’s time to celebrate the bus’s maiden voyage. Maybe if they crack a bottle of champagne over the grille it will amuse us a little. We feel a letdown because we fear the great glory grab. What an easy, free campaign ad it is for the mayor. It’s the feel-good news story of the day, but he had little to do with it. It’s a peace he did not broker. He inherited it. This isn’t how we would have planned it.
And this better be real good, because while we were dialing yesterday at dawn, Anna and I, we had to sit through Oprah and her bunch (the wee hours rerun version) going on and on about nose jobs. We find that Oprah picks up where the alarm clock leaves off because it’s so grating that it makes it impossible to go back to sleep. So one of us blasts Oprah until the other begins dialing in self-defense. Then we turn on something more substantial, like a test pattern.
I forgot about that. During the trial, we brought a lift bus down to show the judge that it wasn’t the menacing contraption the CTA lawyers were making it out to be. She took a ride up on the lift and bopped her head on the overhang.
There’s the exclamation point!
