We went down to Washington for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear yesterday.

It was just what I’d hoped it would be. The crowd was (mostly) relaxed and funny. I saw very few overly earnest types pushing agendas, except maybe the woman behind us who seemed to be pushing her “screeching randomly isn’t annoying” agenda (you can hear her in one of the videos in the slide show below. Sorry.) The performances were great, the jokes were funny, the mocking was gentle and in my view fair.

Larger images are on Flickr.

Lots of highlights: Yusef (Cat Stevens) vs Ozzy train songs. Fr. Guido Sarducci beseeching the Lord for a sign signaling the best religion (strongly hinting that it’s Roman Catholic, of course.) The Roots were great. Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow not so much, but then I’m not a huge fan of them anyway. The Myth Busters guys had us doing fun masses of humanity in one place experiments (250,000 people jumping at once do not cause an earthquake. Myth busted!) Plenty more.

Only real lowlight was at the end. We were nicely situated in a fenced in corner in the middle of the mall, so we sat in our little camp chairs to wait out the exodus. But, for some reason, part of the crowd decided that climbing over the fence in our corner, over our heads, was a reasonable and sane way to exit, rather than the unfenced wide open pathway to the street that was 180 degrees away. It was odd and quite insane, I think. But entertaining aside from nearly being kicked in the head. We eventually decided the sane action for us was to get up and move, which we did, as we looked back on the crowd of about 20 or 30 people who hadn’t grokked that they only had to turn around and walk away to leave the area.

Unfortunately AT&T failed completely, and my battery drained much too quickly as my iPhone searched for a non-existent signal, so not only were we unable to meet up with everyone we’d hoped but I didn’t take nearly as many photos as I’d planned to. Lesson learned- bring both a second camera and a second phone (on T-Mobile!)

But I don’t want to end on a negative note. I’m so glad we went. We had a fantastic time, did manage to get together for dinner with my friend Robb, and even ended up with a nice upgrade on our hotel room. Too bad we were so tired we were in bed watching Jeopardy by 7:30.