Political Events and Bill and Hillary Clinton

In August of 2000, the Democratic National Convention came to Los Angeles, and I was told I would be living at my job for a week.

Not figuratively. My director of catering and I were required to check into the Bonaventure — the hotel we already worked at, in the city we already lived in — and stay there for the duration. This was not presented as a perk.

The Part Where Nobody Plans Anything

Here is what I had assumed about a national political convention: that it is planned.

Here is what is actually true: the convention itself is planned. Everything orbiting the convention is invented approximately forty minutes before it happens.

The Bonaventure was awarded the African-American Caucus. We found this out roughly a week before the convention started. That's the notice. That's it. “You're getting the caucus, they'll be hosting their events with you, good luck.”

So for seven days, my job was to sit in an office and wait for someone to walk in and tell me they needed a room, a menu, a bar, and a hundred and fifty chairs, ideally the day after tomorrow. Plan it on the spot. Execute it within the week. Then do it again.

I put together somewhere around twenty events in seven days.

I did not sleep. I want to be clear that I'm not being dramatic — I mean I did not meaningfully sleep, for a week, in a hotel room forty feet above the ballroom where the next pop-up was going to happen.

The Stormtroopers

The other reason we stayed in the hotel is that we weren't allowed to leave it.

Downtown LA was on lockdown. The actual convention was at Staples Center, right down the street, and the perimeter around our building — and the buildings near it, and the convention center, and most of the neighborhood — was ringed with what I can only describe as men who looked like Stormtroopers. Big plastic face shields. Guns. All the way around.

Coming and going was simply not an option.

My mother was beside herself. Politics gets people worked up on all sides, and her daughter was inside the ring with the shields and the guns and the very poor cell service. I have rarely been so thoroughly worried about by another person.

Hillary

At one point the caucus had Hillary Clinton speaking at one of their events, and I learned what happens to a hotel when someone of that stature walks through it.

The answer: a helicopter arrival on the roof, and every single service hallway pipe-and-draped from end to end. Not decorated — sealed. Fabric walls, no access, nobody in or out for the entire window that the very important person is moving through the back of the house.

I have run banquet hallways for forty-five years. I had never seen one turned into a tunnel.

And I got to go through the line and shake her hand. Which, at that point in my career, was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. I was thrilled beyond words and running on about nine hours of sleep across five days, so I imagine my handshake had a certain haunted quality.

The Money Part, Which Is Comedy

Now let me tell you about billing a national political convention.

Everything had to be paid before it happened. That's the rule. And “pop-up” means there is exactly one practical payment method: a credit card, run immediately.

This was 2000, so PCI compliance was still in its charmingly relaxed adolescence. Someone could hand you a card, or read you a number over the phone, and you could just — run it. You cannot do any of that now, and the modern process involves considerably more paperwork and considerably fewer lawsuits.

But here was the actual problem, and it was not technological.

A lot of the people organizing these events were volunteers. Lovely, enthusiastic, extremely well-intentioned people who were not seasoned meeting planners. They had been dispatched to go make an event happen. What they had not been given was the party's credit card, or the phone number of the person holding the party's credit card, or — I suspect in a few cases — any real anticipation that these events were going to cost money at all.

Trust me. They all cost money.

So you'd have a perfectly nice person standing in your office, glowing about a reception for two hundred people tomorrow night, and you'd have to say the words “and how will we be handling payment,” and watch the glow go out.

A Brief Aside About Sacks of Cash

While we're on payment: yes, I have had clients pay in cash.

Never a corporation. Never a conference. Always social — a wedding, a quinceañera, a big birthday, an anniversary. Families with a lot of money who, for reasons that were none of my business, simply did not care to involve a bank.

They would arrive with sacks. Twenty thousand dollars. Forty thousand dollars. And it had to be counted by hand at the front desk, in front of roughly three employees, so that everybody on both sides could agree on the number before it went in the safe.

That is a very long, very quiet ten minutes of your life.

The Barbie

At the end of that impossible week, my boss got me a Democratic National Convention Barbie.

Red suit. Credential around her neck. “CONVENTION 2000” printed right on the front of the package. He snagged it as memorabilia and handed it to me, and I have never opened it. Twenty-six years. Pristine. Still in the box.

He and I were not quite best friends yet at that point, but we were headed there, and he turned out to be the best boss I ever had. So the Barbie is not really about the convention.

Ten Years Later: The Socks

The other political event I want to tell you about was much smaller and much better.

Around 2010, Gavin Newsom was running for governor, and we hosted a reception for him at the Biltmore — Emerald Ballroom — with President Bill Clinton speaking on his behalf.

It was my event, which meant I got to stand with the security team and the general manager at the arrival door. The Biltmore has a hidden back driveway, almost an alley, that comes up into the foyer off the ballrooms. That's where he was coming in.

That same night we had a student event — I'm fairly sure it was USC, some kind of admissions reception — in the Tiffany and Crystal, right off that same foyer. Security came through beforehand and briefed everyone: he's going to walk through here, you may not say anything, you may not do anything, stand still. They didn't clear the event out. They just froze it.

Those students were vibrating. I was vibrating. I was about to meet a President of the United States.

So the doors open, the car pulls up, and President Clinton steps out —

— and he is completely undone by static cling.

The bottoms of his pant legs are stuck to his socks. And there we all are, standing at attention with a security detail, while the former leader of the free world bends over and fusses at his own ankles, at length, with real feeling. Because they will not stop clinging.

Somebody got him sorted. They brought him in, introduced him to our director of security, our general manager, and me. He shook all our hands and immediately said — before anyone could ask — “would you like a picture?”

We got our wonderful picture.

The Football Field

And then he did the thing I actually think about.

He came down a few steps and there were the eight or so USC kids, lined up along their registration desk, having been told to stand still and be silent. Security is already moving — come on, Mr. President, the reception — and he just walks right over and shakes every single hand.

You could watch the detail deflate. All of them glancing at each other like: oh, for God's sake, he's doing it again.

Then he started down the foyer, which is — I'll say half a football field, and I am being conservative. And every person he passed, he peeled off for. A housekeeper. A bellman. Somebody who had wandered in and been stopped by security mid-stride. Hand out, hi, how are you doing. Security holding the whole hallway in a kind of exasperated hover.

It took forever. He was at the actual reception for maybe two minutes, and then he was whisked back out through his security and gone.

I adore Bill Clinton, and I'm aware that's a whole political sentence to say out loud, so let me narrow it: I don't have an opinion for you about anybody's policy. What I have is forty-five years of watching important people move through the back halls of hotels, and almost none of them see the housekeeper.

That night, twenty people got a handshake they weren't scheduled to get, and one catering director got a story she's still telling in 2026.

Also his socks were killing him the entire time.