Day 1 as a DNC Volunteer :)

Today was my first day volunteering at the Democratic National Convention. It's been a long process, but last week I found out that I was actually assigned to be inside the "perimeter" of the convention at the Pepsi center. The convention starts tomorrow, but they wanted some of the volunteers there today just to get familiar with the things we would be doing. Because the convention hasn't started yet, I had credentials that meant I could go all the way onto the convention floor. They had told us not to bring cameras, but when I got there today, SO MANY people had cameras, and all I had was my cell phone... so the quality of my pictures isn't great, but tomorrow I'm bringing the real camera. After we got a tour of the spots we'd be working we were free to go in and explore the site. Within a few minutes, we saw Governor Bill Ritter. We went in to see the stage, and almost right away saw George Stephanopolous and Charles Gibson.


We were able to get within about 10 feet of where they were, but with the lighting for the broadcast, I couldn't get a decent picture from that angle.

We headed back down to the floor, and saw Katie Couric doing her nightly broadcast too. We were no more than 20 feet away while she did the whole broadcast.
While I was standing there watching her, Andrea Mitchell from NBC news went RUNNING by with a whole bunch of staff... they must have been late for something!

I managed to get a bunch of pictures of the stage.. its really beautiful. I took this one from the Minnesota delegate seats for my brother in law :)


The Colorado Delegates will be front and center... you can see pretty well in this picture that they are just feet from the stage.

After spending a little more time out at the tents with very little to do, we went back in, and CNN was broadcasting live from the convention floor. Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Gloria Borger and Paul Begala were all there, also broadcasting from the convention floor, so we got to watch them too. During the breaks, Anderson Cooper was incredibly nice to everyone, shaking hands, taking pictures with people, signing autographs. I didn't manage to get to the front of the line, because he only had a couple minutes at a time, so I didn't get an autograph, but I was only about 3 feet away from him.

When the CNN people left, we went to check on one of the other volunteers, and I got this picture of the outside of the Pepsi Center

As we walked along, we walked right past Madeline Albright! We were literally 6 feet away. I actually gasped when I saw her (because I am a nerd), but she looked at me and smiled.

I'll be inside the Pepsi Center area every day of the convention, and I'm still holding out a sliver of hope that I'll get assigned to be at Invesco on Thursday during the acceptance speech. Hopefully, the rest of the week will be just as star - studded (lol) and if so, I'll get better pictures and be able to post them here ;)