While most see the upcoming Democratic National Convention as an event to nominate a presidential candidate, we locals see it as a reason to worry.
Even those of us who have nothing to do with anything.
First, there’s housework. We’re frantically shoveling out our guest rooms, waiting for the last-minute arrivals with dollar signs in our eyes.
And we must strategize. We have to avoid downtown next week. Avoid the sign-thumpers, the screamers, the wild, drunken rioters. And those are just the delegates.
In full avoidance mode, we’re telling ourselves that watching the convention on TV within a 30-mile radius of the epicenter is more meaningful than watching it in, say, Bangor, Maine.
Then we need to worry how Denver will look to outsiders. We may act blasé, but we have the mother of all butterflies in our collective tummies.
Oh, sure, we’ll be hosting the country’s top Democrats. Rockin’ Obama. She Who Will Not Be Vanquished. He Who Really Won the Presidential Election in 2004. He Who Really Won the Presidential Election in 2000. Kucinich, the Brave Elf.
But we’re really preening for the press. Not the network nambies—the basic-cable trifecta: Jon Stewart! Keith Olbermann! Mika Brzezinski!
Welcome to our shiny clean city and shiny clean venues.
The Can.
Mile High Stadium.
That’s right, I said it. Note to out-of-towners: We hate the name Invesco Field at Mile High so much, we sued. And, just as we feared, hardly any of you says the Mile High part. Bronco fans crave the Mile High part if, for nothing else, to remind the opposing team that, yes, we have no oxygen.
Back to our worry list. What will our esteemed visitors think of our fair burg? Cow town or thriving (albeit cute) metropolis?
Aside from the new cowboy-esque jingle and drawling announcer on the DIA trains and the geeky little cowboy hats on the DIA volunteers, visitors will likely not be reminded of our cow-y culture. For one thing, they probably won’t see one single, live cow.
From the air, they’ll first see a giant pizza crop circle, confirming that pizza is indeed the food of the gods. Then they’ll see the white DIA tent, pitched in the desert of the eastern plains. (Oh, it’s supposed to resemble mountain peaks? Seriously?)
After they land, we can only hope that Jon, Keith and Mika will think Diablo the Demon Horse is the Bronco mascot and not the most terrifying equid since that psycho metal thing with glowing red eyes in Equus. (Did your personal tour guide mention the beast actually killed its creator? Oh yeah, we bad. We mostly white, but we bad.)
Once our honored guests climb into their well-appointed hired cars — and get over the shock of a 65 mile-per-hour speed limit at an airport and the fact that inhaling no longer delivers oxygen to their bloodstreams — they’ll have a lovely ground-eye view of Kansas.
As they turn west onto Pena Boulevard, they might get a panoramic of the Front Range through the August, um, haze. Yep, those are the peaks DIA is supposed to look like. Uncanny, isn’t it?
Then they’ll go through Saudi Aurora in all its glory. (It’s a dry heat!) A few miles down I-70, they’ll see the smoke curling up from the Purina factory chimney. (Ahhh, there’s nothing like the smell of baked Alpo in the morning.)
Downtown, they’ll see a city built diagonally to every other street grid in the state to align with what we self-importantly call a “confluence,” a can’t-get-there-from-here maze of one-way streets, a light rail that will hunt you down and kill you, and a lot of brick.
And they’ll see that we have no clue how to grow daisies. Or not.
And they’ll wonder where the locals are.
See the locals! Rent our rooms!
Rene E. Riley is a professional writer and editor based in Evergreen, Colorado.
