The definitive reporters WCHU and Obama Delegate Berry in Washington

Geoff Dunn and Michelle Berry at the Inauguration (see excerpt of Lansing Star's coverage) and WHCU's blog:
http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=46687578861&h=IDmkJ&u=z8dwC&ref=mf


http://www.lansingstar.com/content/view/4474/294/


When I first pasted this story to my Facebook, here's two lovely responses:

John P. Sullivan at 11:53am January 21
Two of my favorite Ithacans!

Terry Burns at 9:43am January 22
Great interview!

Excerpt from the Lansing Star is below

LS: Geoff, yours was just getting places and finding people. What I'm keying off of is when you ended your interview with Michelle Berry she said, 'Thanks for finding me.' How the heck did you find her?!

GD: Well, we had already made contact, obviously, before leaving Ithaca and making sure that we were going to meet up at a certain spot. Our original plan was to meet in Congressman Hinchey's office. She was the Obama delegate representing the 22nd district, Hinchey's district.I had my interview set up with (Congressman) Michael Arcuri, and then I was going to meet her at Hinchey's office to do the interview. That all changed when I got up to the Cannon Office Building to see Michael Arcuri and realized that the line was all around the building. Each office building -- Longworth, Cannon, and Rayburn, all had long lines of people who were standing in line to see their congressman or congresswoman to get their passes, because they weren't sending their tickets out by mail.

At that point I called her and said, 'We're going to have to bag it because you're going to have to stand in line for an hour to get in there.LS: You had already stood in line for an hour?GD: After I stupidly stood in line myself for an hour to get in, and then realized I could have just gone up to the guard and said, 'I've got an interview, I'm not here to get tickets.' And they would have let me in. But I didn't know that at the time,because when I called the office the staffers told me we had to stand in line, too.We just made contact by phone and we actually ended up doing the interview outside Federal Center Southwest Metro Station. They had a few eateries -- there's a Starbucks and a couple of outer spots there. There were some open tables and chairs outside, so we ended up doing the interview there.

LS: You couldn't have done that at the Kennedy inauguration becaue they didn't have cell phones then.

DV: Absolutely! Cell phones made a world of difference. At the very same location where Geoff intervied Michelle Berry on Monday, there we were Tuesday afternoon. The trains had been shut down temporarily, because of the overload of people. They wouldn't let people on the platform because one woman had fallen down on the tracks earlier in the day. So they were being extra cautious.But that created a mass sea of people trying to go home. They couldn't go home because there were no busses, the roads were closed, and the subways were temporarily closed. So at that very same intersection we discovered we were stuck in the cold of Washington, D.C. The wind was blowing even more then.