Witnessing history AND an Irish bar, to boot

If you had tickets to go downtown Tuesday night to the Barackapalooza in Grant Park and you took a pass, kick yourself. Or at least go rent Risky Business and dance around in your underwear to make up for your wimpy self. Because like pre-Scientology Tom Cruise says in that movie, sometimes you just gotta say, What the...

Imagine if Barack Obama hadn't taken a chance, a chance nobody really gave him a shot at. I mean, beat Hillary Clinton? Defy the pundits and all their collective wisdom? Come on!

All you had to do was call in sick or sleep at your desk today so you could witness history last Tuesday. But you didn't. And now you can't tell your grandchildren that you were there when American elected its first African American president - from the South Side of Chicago, no less, which is still hard for most people from here over the age of 35 to fully grasp just yet.

My buddy Shay Clarke decided to go for it. He dressed up nice in a coat and a tie and headed into Chicago Tuesday afternoon with me. I dressed like a cameraman in jeans and a sweatshirt my shaved head covered in a Notre Dame baseball cap.

Our plan: meet my pals Alison and Tony in Oak Park and take the el into Chicago rally. A & T were blogging and had tickets to what turned out to be a sort of fun-loving cattle pen for ticketed supporters. Shay was going to use Kitty O'Shea's in the Hilton along Michigan Avenue as his base. And I was heading to the mediaquarium, a giant fishbowl for 6,000 journalists of all sorts, hangers-on and the connected.

First we ate at a cafe in the People's Republic of Oak Park - and I call it that because I got in a Rush Limbaugh sort of mood, which was actually more Stephen Colbert, which means I was making jokes about liberal stereotypes. I warned that anyone going to the rally would have his or her wallet confiscated before entering the Obamarama, with the contents evenly redistributed at the end of the night. And that we really didn't need to be eating, as Obama could feed the faithful on a couple loves of bread and some fish.

I had a bowl of pumpkin soup (imagine baby food) and suggested that under Obama we would all be required to eat more fruits and vegetables, if not become vegetarians altogether. And if we did eat meat, or tuna, as my friend did, it would have to be free range and glad to give its life for the greater good.

See how easy it is to make funny like a talk radio show host? Easier than it was for the pregnant woman to get up the stairs from the el to the Loop, at least.

And there was a mood of levity tempered with slight apprehension about what would be happening that night. All of which meant for me that joining Shay at Kitty's before joining my comrades in the 5th Estate City, was in order. Beer has its purposes.

The bar was strictly enforcing its rules for capacity, letting an equal number of people in and out, and in about 10 minutes we found some room inside next to a couple from Crystal Lake waiting for their son. The two decided that afternoon to come down for the festivities, which included corned beef sandwiches and for Mike Poper, remembering growing up in the city and playing baseball with Richie Daley at Thillens Stadium off Elston on the northwest side.

They voted for Obama, and it turned out that typically GOP-loving McHenry County went for Illinois's junior senator, too, as did most of Chicago's collar counties. What turned the Mrs. off about McCain? The choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate and the way he ran his campaign the last month or so.

While I chatted with the couple, Shay made fast friends with Paul from Rogers Park, waiting for a friend with a ticket to arrive. He had on a Grateful Dead-themed pin which he gave to Shay. His wife made such pins to sell to raise money for the campaign. It reminded me of Ray Rayner, and if you get that, you grew up in Chicago.

Either way, that gesture gave Shay his theme for the night - taking photos of pins, buttons and t-shirts for his Facebook page. Sorry kids, even grandfathers are posting these days. Plus, Shay knew the guys in the Celtic band that was going to play.

I left my friend to his mission and wound up following two young women with press credentials to the media entrance. They had gone to the wrong spot first as they weren't really media. They had friends who work for Michele Obama (this is Chicago, kapish?). And they were from Batavia and Rockford.

At the site, I expected they would cross reference my pass with a check list and ask for ID, but all I had to do was have the lanyard dangling, turn on all my electronic equipment and pass through airport style security.

This video village looked like a cross between a Hollywood back lot, a VIP tailgate area, and an Army barracks. There were trailers, huge bright lights everywhere, tents where you needed credentials on top of your credentials to sit and type away on your laptop, other tents with buffets for special guests, and CNN on everywhere.

I made my way to where the actual people were, to see that they were fenced off, and you needed to wait in another line to get to mingle with the masses. So a good many reporters lined the fence talking to those who happened to wind up close to the cameras and crews shooting them as if they were exotic zoo animals. Oh look! It's Ronnie "Woo-Woo" the goofy Cubs fan. Wow, a black person with a gay pride flag! O my! How weird. It's November and people are wearing shorts in Chicago.

I joked with women reporter from Canada who was on a ladder about how quite a few male reporters were drawn to two Obama Girls Gone Wild types in tight t-shirts. I gave her my card just in case I ever need to flee the country, I guess.

Me, I talked to some cougars wearing flimsy tiaras.

"I grew up in Wrigleyville. That's why I'm here. I had to be here," said Donna Cooperman, who I am pretty sure gave me a fake name. Hey, her pal said she was Donna Edens and the expressway was named after her grandfather.

Ellen Tully and her daughter Caleigh were along the fence, too, lighting it up for crews from who knows what corner of the globe. Caleigh promised her dad she would make class Wednesday, so her and mom got a hotel room close by for the night. I think they were a well-off family which, again, sort of went against that whole socialist argument McCain tried to make.

I wandered off for some water, passing on the $10 barbecue Cuban pork sandwiches on the way. Further proof Democrats aren't socialists: water was $3 a bottle.

Scariest moment of the night: Seeing disrespected reporter Amy "I'm wearing my bathing suit at the home of a potential murder suspect" Jacobsen saying hello to reviled Cook County Board president Todd Stroger. I shuddered and needed to go freshen up.

A nice thing about media credentials is there were plenty of clean portable johns with no lines available. That was a far cry from where my friends were, where they could barely move. And where they were was set up oddly, with most of the throng off to the right of where the super friends of Obama and Biden could look pretty for TV in front of the stage and with the media bleachers surrounding them. I wonder if they provided makeup along with all the flags.

I think I may have been in one of those toilets when one of the first loud roars happened, laughing about my fate being taking a leak as history is being made. But I think the inevitable happened after I finished talking to the guy who was selling the $3 water, who originally was from Kalamazoo and could relate to a Chicago guy like me trying to wrap his head around what was happening in a city where less than 30 years ago a black guy became mayor for the first time after a really ugly campaign.

Hell, Obama got his political teeth cut community organizing about 10 miles south of Grant Park, using Catholic churches where my parents went way, way back in the day - in a day when the tribal rules of Chicago meant you stayed with your own kind. Chicago got the first Irish Catholic elected, the Chicago way, less than 50 years ago.

Change, indeed.

And now here I was rushing to see an elated crowd, a weight lifted off its shoulders, if just for the night, watching McCain give a gracious acceptance speech, then waiting for the first real rock star president to give his usual even-tempered speech, his Bob the Builder, yes we can talk.

Before the magic moment, the rainbow multitude had to suffer through Anderson Cooper chatting from the CNN studio with a hologram of hipster Will I Am on site in Chicago, too. Apparently, split screen is too old school.

I saw some Japanese reporters taking pictures of each other with their own cameras. I got hugged by a reporter I met Sunday who works for Al Jazeera. Her little pal called me sweet. Another big lug like me from Chicago and I joked about each getting a photo of Obama from our vantage point, with a SWAT team looking on, where he will just appear a spot or blur.

On the walk out of the park I talked to some happy black women from the city who admitted they had been crying tears of joy. There was no beer to fuel fools, but the crowd was giddy.

Back along Michigan Avenue, where there were riots 40 years ago during the Democratic National Convention, a spontaneous parade took place. Shay witnessed the hooting and hollering that broke out after Obama was declared the winner. Even the cops on horseback were smiling, he said.

Shay also managed to get an invite from two women from Wimbledon, England to Joe Biden's party. And after smoking outside the Hilton with Congressman Danny Davis - and singing Danny Boy with him - headed up for a time to a bash hosted by Jesse Jackson.

But by the time my friends got back to the Hilton, the hotel wasn't letting anyone but guests inside. So the four of us headed back to the el, past a herd of cops heading home, too. It was after 1 a.m and there were just a few people on the train back to Oak Park. There were no signs of any media-imagined potential riot that had been played up on cable prior to the voting.

The streets were quiet. It was a work night, after all, and there is plenty of work to be done.