Subject: Convention Diary -- Enough to Make a Stone Sad Date: Published: 7/15/92 (248 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Convention Diary -- Enough to Make a Stone Sad ---- By Manuela Hoelterhoff Friday, July 10: So where were they? Where were the women chained to the Brooklyn Bridge? Four years have passed since thousands of us last beat stories out of the dying donkey, vowing we'd never do it again, ever. But there I was at 10 a.m. trailing rivulets of sweat in the hellish heat, futilely checking bridge girders for the Women's Action Coalition and the posters they promised to bring highlighting "abortion, censorship, education, violence." Could they please add garbage to the list? "Women Against Filth" would have had my vote as I picked my way through the cans and bottles littering City Hall Park en route to my office. Only now were the delegates, whom we the press outnumber by at least five to one, arriving in New York, and there was time to kill. Why not call a fearless gourmet to advise hungry conventioneers? Someone like Gersh Kuntzman, who once staved my appetite for days reviewing a Chinese restaurant I used to like. ("In between the shell and the unnoticeable meat center is a peritoneal layer of slime which keeps the meat slidin' away.") Gersh, I said, tell me: What do you recommend for folks in a hurry? The dirty water dogs sold from those carts with the cheery umbrellas? "Well," he said, "the dirty water dog is certainly a nutritious treat and readily available in all major Manhattan gridlock centers. But my vote goes to the knish. Eat a potatoe knish and it will last nearly the entire convention. Stays in your stomach for three days." Just then I remembered I was supposed to have some dessert with two Russian singers who were appearing at Lincoln Center with the Kirov Opera from St. Petersburg. Rushing uptown, I found Galina Gorchakova spooning ice cream -- she's from Siberia and needed to cool down in temperatures pushing past 90 -- with Sergei Leiferkus by her side, finishing his white wine. Just the night before, Sergei had sung in "Boris Godunov," an opera about a politician who got to be ruler of Russia without driving his people nuts with a boring election. Boris just throttled the competition. "So would you vote the youth ticket? " I asked the 30-year-old diva. "Nyet!" she declared. "Personally, I always go for the billionaire." Sergei, though, was a baritone for Bush. "We have the same inflated concept of Bush you Americans have of Gorbachev," he explained. It was getting late in the afternoon, and time for a quick visit to the police fortress arising at Madison Square Garden. I noticed some of my colleagues were already hard at work interviewing the only beggar not (yet) swept from view in the city's pre-convention cleanup of the Garden's neighborhood. There was some hope among locals that the buildings would be removed along with the people sleeping inside them, but New Yorkers live to be disappointed daily. How did Khrushchev put it when he visited New York many years ago? "There is no greenery," he said. "It is enough to make a stone sad." I went home to buy an air conditioner that did not fit into my window. The exertion nearly killed me and may explain why I failed in my one evening assignment: to attend an alternative forum featuring the Rev. Calvin Butts, a black pro-Perot minister from the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He was scheduled to preach -- hold on to your party hats -- at a synagogue on West 86th Street. Let's just say that by the time my dehydrated companion was ready to hail an ambulance, we had mistakenly entered many West Side churches and synagogues, one of them a conservative center for Jewish studies. "Do you wish to pray? " an earnest woman asked after we barged in on six people gathered quietly in a darkened room. She looked startled to hear that Mr. Butts might be dropping by. Then she looked at our address and said: "I see the problem. This group used to be here, but then the roof fell in and now they meet elsewhere." First the women, now the Baptists. Shaken, I went home and sat between my fan and TV listening to Bush explain why the people of Sarajevo must be butchered because they didn't dig any oil things. Saturday, July 11: The first phone call brought another disappointment: Queen Latifah, the rapping regal relative of Sister Souljah, had canceled her concert in Central Park. Then I cheered up remembering the forgotten children's march starting at Union Square, just around the corner from Knish Nosh, Gersh's favorite knoshery, and a few steps away from where the phone company recently cut the public phone lines to thwart drug dealers (who turned to portables). Organizers promised free ice cream from Ben and Jerry's to the homeless tots who didn't perish en route to Central Park in a modern version of the Children's Crusade to the Holy Land. Clutching a large water bottle I headed downtown and briefly panicked before finally spotting four little people and their adult handlers laboring under large signs asking "But Mommy! Where will we sleep tonight? " For $1.35 I picked up lunch and dinner for the next three days (the potatoe knish) and headed back uptown. Summery breezes laced with urine wafted from the homeless depot by the Bethesda Fountain, as I wandered through Central Park to hear the Queen's replacement rappers, Dream Warriors, who produced six identifiable words during a whole half hour: "Put Your Face in My Sink!" This reminded me that I needed a shower. A fresh and rested me reported to the prayer vigil at St. John the Baptist Church near the convention site. Inside, protected by the kind of police force New Yorkers would like to see at their local schools, were members of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and their friends, praying for the souls of the people who were blowing whistles outside. With all the racket, it was hard to focus on the architecture, really quite fine, with the neo-Gothic facade attractively decorated with rosettes and nicely carved columns, though the nave itself, shockingly clad with corrugated aluminum siding, was enough to make, well, a stone sad. By then it was nearly 8 -- time for the media party behind the New York Public Library in Bryant Park, where an entire street had been closed down to facilitate the natural bonding between free food and media folk. I nibbled on a knish to honor the fearless Indiana guardsman and championship speller and then cabbed down to see his boss impersonated at the Ballroom, a restaurant with a tapas bar and small stage. "Jobs, jobs, jobs -- wrote that line myself," Bush was babbling. "Doesn't matter if you're black, Asian or Hispaniel, or one of those fringe groups, women, babble babble babble." Then Jim Morris changed his face and turned into Bill Clinton. "Certain criminals should be placed in gas chambers and told not to inhale!" he said, giving us a foretaste of the speech we all eagerly await Thursday. Sunday, July 12: The Jerry Brown picnic was the first must-do event for the press that had worked so hard to polish his California flake image. Ignoring steady drizzle, some 200 followers cheered as the sore loser arrived in the northern reaches of Central Park near Harlem to speak of his humility agenda, which thanks to the erratic sound system I at first misunderstood as the humidity agenda. Near the makeshift stage, I met someone I didn't think existed, an elderly, elegant black woman who told me she once voted for George Wallace. "He said what he meant," she explained. "Living in Alabama years ago taught me to stand 10 feet tall when I came to New York and met true hypocrites." Which reminded me that the Rev. Al Sharpton was gathering his forces at Columbus Circle for a Black Agenda March on Bill Clinton's hotel -- fortunately for Big Al not too far away. Big Al is both rotund and orotund and, also like Big Bill, the owner of a memorable coif. But he kept it out of harm's way, standing under a huge umbrella, facing a large and drippingly eager press corps who longed to hear him say: "Let's burn the hotel and watch the fatso fry." But just like slick Willie, Big Al is outgrowing his past as he reaches for the future and Al D'Amato's Senate seat. This meant he was boring just like the rest of his party and, for that matter, his attendants. "Let him through!" a voice boomed behind me, then adding "Please? " like a new word from a foreign language. "Plant a Bush. Grow Your Own Dope" -- could I wear this T-shirt to Mort Zuckerman's party? Evening approached and sartorial decisions were hard on this, the big party night for conventioneers. For instance, I would be moving on to the party given by The Nation, the favorite publication of Stalinist flower children, which called for a peasant dress and beads. In the triplex of mighty mogul Mort, who once made ex-girlfriend Gloria Steinem miserable (thereby increasing his standing among many), powerbrokers and old-timers (George McGovern!) contemplated awesome matters over delicate hors d'oeuvres. Would Roger Ailes return to the Bush campaign? The media guru said he was too busy making money and, besides, had been replaced by six people. Here's the solution: Get your old job back and ask for all six salaries. It's sure time to bring back the Age of Greed, I thought, stepping into the twilight zone of the Village Gate, a jazz club left over from the beatnik era, where The Nation folks were drinking beer we had to pay for ourselves and eating food that looked like it had been left under a rock at Woodstock these past 20 years. Pete Seeger (isn't he dead? ) played his guitar. Monday, July 13: A person needed time to recover from a shock like that, but by 11 a.m. I was at the Hilton attending something called Delegate Bootcamp, devoted to training future candidates in the latest fund-raising techniques (munch, munch, munch) and "lightening sic attacks to exploit weaknesses." The speaker suggested the Republicans should have waited with the Flowers stuff to inflict even greater damage. "I think Bill Clinton has survived because the people hate us more than politicians," was the assessment of ABC's Sander Vanocur, who spoke at a Freedom Forum on the amusing topic of "Privacy in Politics: Have We Gone Too Far? " Yeah, but they love us too. Who else would that mangy man holding a dirty doll and an Abortion-Holocaust placard in the protest area directly behind the Garden get to talk to but people like me, desperate for copy? By late afternoon, this thin sliver of sidewalk begrudgingly carved out of acres of space by a city and a party determined to stifle all signs of discord was a hotbed of activity as a makeshift soup kitchen ladled food for the homeless and hangers-on. In sun so broiling, who needed chafing dishes? I worried briefly as an ambulance picked up one of the eaters, but found the chicken really quite tasty indeed. In a moment that would have gladdened Breughel, the pimple-faced Committee to Elect Porky for President took their places in the demo area, beating a bass drum and handing out their platform. Among the points: Take congresspersons off salary and pay them on a straight commission basis, publish doctors' medical grades in the phone book and, to erase the post office deficit, print Madonna's photograph on stamps. Speaking of the cone-breasted babe, she could have livened up the women's march and rally at Columbus Circle. Never mind an announcement festooned with names like Mort's ex, Shere Hite and Pat Schroeder. All the stunned crowd got to hear as a send-off was a poet who couldn't rhyme and an unknown soprano warbling "The Song of the Shoefly" with new lyrics. "Harassment don't bother me. I fight for equality.... I don't belong to you and me.... Gonna end sexual slavery. I feel like the morning fly." I stared down at my shoes. Take us home, now, they pleaded. Tuesday, July 14: Today was the fashion show for delegates in Central Park, meaning the Bush T-shirt finally got an airing, fitting right in with the donkey hats and the sunshine pantsuits favored by the Florida contingent. This was one of the more thoughtful events I attended. Everyone got a shopping bag containing a partial change of clothes for the clammy chic: knee socks, visor, T-shirt and an eye-catching gilt chain that would mark you as a dead person on the subway. Then I headed back toward the Garden feeling oddly light, even giddy, before remembering that three days had passed since my knish. I could eat again; but not long thereafter much of Midtown came to a halt for the AIDS Action as thousands of activists gathered at the Circle for a march down Broadway. It was there that I picked up a button that will surely sell briskly as November nears: Nobody For President. --- Ms. Hoelterhoff, the Journal's books editor, is a convention veteran. 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