Maria and Lori's Blog: HRC National Dinner

So flying in on Monday and getting back into the swing of things was hard on all of us. Where were our tapas? Lori's sangria and the Estrella that Maria became accustomed to drinking? And you mean to say that we need to be at a specific place at a specific time? This 'real world' stuff sucks.

We originally decided not to attend the HRC National Dinner this year. The expense of the ticket price ($250/person), driving/parking, hotel room, etc etc was a lot to take on after being away for two weeks. Lori has vacation time, but Maria leads the life of a self-employed freelancer, so the money is great WHEN she is working. So we were both ok with the decision to forego this event in '09.

Then Obama announced he would be speaking at the dinner.

Maria has interpreted for Obama while he was on the campaign trail 6 or 7 times, but Lori never heard him speak in person. This changed things! Lori got on the phone and tried her best to get a ticket for this sold-out-with-a-huge-waiting-list event. As luck would have it, a friend of ours was unable to attend so Lori was able to use her ticket. And then we found out that HRC was unable to find a sign language interpreter for the dinner. Great! Lori scored a ticket, and Maria interpreted the festivities. All good!

There were 3,000 attendees at the national dinner, and we are appreciative of how Obama handled his speech and restated his commitments. There is quite a lot of injustice and errors made in the past that our current president has the daunting task of leading us all through the repair process - obviously we are not simply referencing the state-sanctioned discrimination our community has endured.

Here is the video of the entire speech given at the HRC National Dinner on Saturday night. Again, Obama is the first president to speak at a national fundraising event such as this:

Many other notables on stage and in the audience:

Jane Lynch and the cast of Glee.