Waiting for Barack

Hugh Jackman is one fine piece of manhood. What this has to do with Barack Obama you’ll have to bear with me a moment and you shall see. If you have not yet been to see the movie Wolverine, Jackman’s fourth outing as that character, wait no longer, get thee hence to your nearest Cineplex, spring for some popcorn and sit back and enjoy. That man is one of the hottest things on two legs walking around right now. He has that old world charm, the winning smile, he can act, he can dance, he can sing, he seems very secure in himself, loves his wife etc. In short, he is what Victorians used to describe as a “fine figure of a man”. Yes, I would definitely stand around waiting for Hugh.

The most asked (inane) question before/during/after the recent Summit: are you going to see/see/have seen Barack Obama? It would appear that the Summit began and end with the Golden One for most people. You may remember that the leader who got my pulse up was/is Brazil’s Lula, Barack, oh yeah, nice but whatever. I don’t really rave about anybody, other than Hugh of course, the rich and famous are just richer and more, well known versions of us ordinary folk, what’s the big deal? If anybody told me that I and eight of my colleagues would be thundering down fourteen flights of stairs to position ourselves so that we could catch a glimpse of Barack Obama as he pulled up in the “Beast” at the hotel, I would have fallen over laughing.

We are all sensible women and men, we were all pretty jaded by the time Summit arrival day rolled around, and we’d been seeing leaders pretty much most of the day. So when I got the text from Johanna, the White House press lady about “wheels down” I wasn’t too hot and bothered. Watching the arrivals on TV while we worked, suddenly the pressure started to build and all of a sudden we realized that we were where half the country wanted to be. And that’s when the insanity took hold; like the idiots we are, we flung open the doors to the stairs because the elevators took too long, and thundered like a herd of renegade elephants down first one, then two and finally all fourteen flights to make it to the ground floor. As though the man was a rock star and we a bunch of demented groupies, in hindsight, it’s kind of embarrassing. We, so formerly blasé about the waiting for Barack thing, caught in the act as it where.

So the answer to the above question is yes, I did see the man, a few dozen times, I stood right next to him, no, no pictures, that would be crass - I was working. I got to know the Secret Service dudes and the White House press office and am now back to being all blasé. Yes, he is tall, he’s slimmer than he appears on TV, he’s very polite and has that aura of quiet authority. Like Hugh, he is a fine figure of a man, but truthfully; I’d probably trample you to get to Hugh, Barack, not so much.

It was interesting being around all that power, thirty-three leaders in small space certainly gets crowded very quickly. I still think Lula is the bomb and have an even bigger respect for him now, he smiled at me in greeting one day and I blushed. Oh yes I did. For the record, I’m all Baracked out, sure he’s quite something, and his wife is too, I think he’s doing okay as President but I’m really, really tired of hearing about them so stop asking me. One of these days maybe but until then, there are other interesting people out there you know.