D.C.’s Big Dinner

Leah stepped away from her law books Saturday just long enough to get all gussied up and join me at the White House Correspondents Dinner. We attended Washington’s “prom” with my coworkers, my boss and just about half of Hollywood.

We’re not big on snapping pictures with celebs — both of us apparently are a tad shy — but we did get to gander at Bon Jovi, Sting, Kevin Bacon, Natalie Portman, Amy Poehler among others. And while we inched our way through the massive crowd, I turned to find myself about an inch away from Jason Bateman of Arrested Development fame. Our big interaction went as follows:

Me: Uh… Hi.
Him: Hi. How are you?

And then we both kept moving. I will say, he had very nice breath.

That’s not as cool as our friend’s chance encounter with Denis Leary, who stepped out for a smoke. She ran over, threw her arm around him and shouted “I’m an asshole!” I bet the poor man gets that a lot. “I’m an asshole!” is one of his funniest stand-up routines. But he apparently was a little weirded out by our friend’s pronouncement because his response was “Er… I have to go find my seat.”

Hollywood sure likes President Obama. For President Bush’s last correspondents dinner, the big celebrity was Pamela Anderson. But this year, everyone from Demi and Ashton, to Spielberg and Lucas were in the crowd.

Though only once did I force Leah to go introduce herself and pose for a picture.



As a second year law student, how could she pass up the chance to say hello to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia? He was the only one of the famed Nine that we saw at the dinner, most likely he was the only one to attend the shindig.

Eventually we were forced to take our table. After we nibbled on a small salad of salami and a few greens and dined on a hunk of meat and a hunk of fish, Obama took the stage.



Obviously it was kind of hard to get a good look at him, so for most of his routine we watched on one of the big screens.



In case you missed it, the full video of his very funny speech and the biting comedy of Wanda Sykes is posted on C-SPAN’s web site, just click here. You will have to fast forward through some scholarship and award announcements to get to the big speeches.