P+P @ The DNC: The Media Party

Last week, sitting at the Culver City Cuban restaurant, Versailles, in the midst of planning our coverage for the DNC, I asked P+P founder Farai Chideya for some sage insight. She’s covered many conventions, after all: “It’s just as much show business as it is politics,” she answered with no hesitation. “Maybe more.”

Flying into Denver on a tiny United Express plane was an experiment in turbulence tolerance. Our pilot radioed that a tornado could be seen over a lake out the left window. It was an ostentatious beginning to my voyage into the Rockies.

If you are coming from L.A., Chicago, or New York, Denver can hardly be called a city. It reminds me of Minneapolis, the Little City That Could. Strangers compulsively say hello to each other, as if they genuinely cared. For locals, “traffic,” is not being able to change lanes when they want.

We are staying in Highland Park at a house I could only hope to own 20 years down the road. I am driving a rented Durango. I keep waiting for Verne Troyer to pop out out of a dedicated compost recycling bin and offer me three wishes. It’s all very surreal.

Sharifa Johka, our fearless multimedia producer and official documentary filmmaker, and I were the only two to arrive on Saturday. We heard of a “media party” at the amusement park located between the Pepsi Center (the site of the convention) and Invesco Field (where Obama will officially accept the party’s nomination on Thursday).

Having never been to one of these shindigs, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but usually anything with the word “convention’ in the title, involves Powerpoint decks, bad ham sandwiches, and burnt coffee that fails to jolt you out of eight-hour stretches of mindless doodling.

Instead, we arrived at a fully operational amusement park—rides, concessions, carnival games—crammed with press people, all reveling in the free beer and brownie bites. I ran into Amanda Michel, director of The Huffington Post’s Off The Bus section, and the discussion was not about Biden, but about the crazy roller coaster. her and fellow OTB’er Kelly Nuxoll had just experienced.

At one point, fireworks started out of the blue, popping off for a good 15 minutes, from three different locations. It put pretty much every Fourth of July display I’ve seen to shame.

So far, Farai was dead-on. Lots of pomp and a seemingly hollow circumstance. Substance will undoubtedly come, but apparently not without an accompanying dose of cotton candy.

Click on any of the thumbnails below for a larger image. (those are brownie bites, you sicko)