A D.C. inauguration story

The video above tells all about how this IntLawGrrl witnessed the swearing-in of the 44th President of the United States: by radio, the same medium by which Americans heard Calvin Coolidge take the oath 8 decades ago.
It wasn't supposed to have been quite like that.
The day began in pitchblack morning (right), when IntLawGrrl Stephanie Farrior and I hopped the Red Line toward the Mall. Stephanie got off at Metro Center to find a place close to a Jumbotron. I got off at Judiciary Square as instructed by the purple ticket (left) I possessed. All "purple people," as we came to call ourselves, were steered into a tunnel (below). There thousands of us spent more than 3 hours, emerging only to find that the purple gate had not opened and none of us would get in. We could see little more than the spire of the Capitol, and could hear nothing.
Thank goodness for the 1 among us who'd had the good sense to bring a transistor. Clustered around her at the intersection of Louisiana and C, we heard a musical interlude, then the oath that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. administered to Barack Hussein Obama, and then the speech. The sounds alone brought smiles even to the faces of the purple dispossessed.