Suddenly, they're not. Now, at the Tennessee Ball, Cubine's assistant runs up to tell her that a guy from the D.C. fire marshal's office wants to speak to her; there are too many people crowding the stage. Cubine quickly redistributes the throng to other parts of the hall, but the fire marshal shuts the ball down. Waiting outside in the 21-degree cold are a couple of hundred would-be guests, including ambassadors from Sweden, Germany, and Italy, and Miss America, who reportedly led the chilly crowd in singing “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
But soon the evening returns to full swing, and Cubine hooks up with her friend Laura Hartigan, a statuesque redhead in black satin Badgley Mischka, and the two women head backstage to hang out with the guys from Hootie. Hartigan, 30, is deputy to Clinton's campaign-finance cochairman Terry McAuliffe. “She knows heads of state, senators, movie stars,” Cubine says. “But I've never seen her so excited as getting to meet Hootie.”
As the band performs an encore, Hartigan kicks off her satin Donna Karan pumps with the four-inch heels and the girls dance.
“Cue,” she says to Cubine. “This is really cool.”
Just ten days earlier, the mood hadn't been so unabashedly upbeat. On the sixth floor at the Inaugural Committee's makeshift headquarters, the former home of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Laura Hartigan was heading into her first all-nighter, dedicated to the excruciatingly sensitive task of arranging seating for the $3,000-a-ticket VIPs at the inaugural musical gala. Over in Ticketing, Kim Cubine was trying to make sure that there wasn't another bottleneck disaster like the one at the 1993 inauguration—where 40,000 people showed up to pick up their tickets on the same day.
Then there was the crucial issue of pre-party spin control: This year's hosts went to great lengths to emphasize that the inauguration was open to the public. There was about this the ring of embarrassment, an attempt by the Clinton people to extricate themselves from the celebrity worship and general lavishness that characterized the last inaugural (and, some would say, Clinton's first term). Last time around, the $34 million lovefest came with the bus ride from Monticello, the 30-by-60-foot fireworks silhouette of Clinton playing a saxophone, the MTV ball, Barbra Streisand in the Lincoln Bedroom, Maya Angelou's poem, and Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Uma Thurman.
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