And another welcome to all those who may be generous enough to be following our Crashing the States project!
I have to say--being in Northern Virginia gets me really excited. You can feel the change happening politically--it's in the air here. It's like an epicenter of the entire movement, and you can feel the energy. That, and the countryside is absolutely gorgeous.
As you may have read in teacherken's recent diary on the subject, the Crashing The States crew as at the biennial pig roast with Mark Warner at the Rappahanock Bend Farm. Despite the brief period of inclement weather, it was a fantastic event. Below the fold is a recap and the "official" Crashing the States photoessay!
The Crashing the States crew had just driven up from Charlotte the previous evening. We were originally going to head to DC, but as it turns out, everything takes a lot longer than you think it's going to when you're doing something like this project. As it was already perilously late--around 4am!--we just decided to go ahead and find a place to stay in King George, close to the site of the pig roast the next day.
Now, I'm someone who has never really done any filmmaking before--I'm here because I blog :-) And you never really realize how much work goes into something like this until you actually do it. I submit as evidence the following picture of our table we used at the Holiday Inn express to recharge our...well...everything. I myself have four items I need to charge nightly: my laptop, my camera battery, my cell phone, and my bluetooth. Add to that Reality Bites Back, our cameraman A.J., and all the camera equipment, and it ends up becoming a messy situation:
As we only ended up getting to sleep at 5:30am, and it takes a long time to set up the camera equipment the next day, we only got to the pig roast ready to shoot at about 2:00. We were worried that we had irreparably missed some good stuff, but it turns out that everything ended up being just fine.
Until you're actually here, you don't realize how beautiful the countryside of Northern Virginia (the real Virginia?) actually is. Rappahanock Bend Farm is located right on the bank of the Rappahanock river--which you'll see in a photo below. Here's a shot of the "parking lot" and some people arriving at the event:
Once we got there, we started looking for familiar faces. teacherken had sent me an email telling me he was going to be at the event the whole time, so I was looking for him. Thankfully, he ended up finding us, and introduced us to a few other Virginia bloggers, including Ben (notlarrysabato, who broke "macaca") and phriendlyjaime. Not pictured here is Thaddeus Toad, to whom we were introduced. We did a group interview with teacherken, notlarrysabato, and phriendlyjaime:
We also met with Jerome Armstrong, whom we will be interviewing before the Webb fundraiser on the 21st. Here he is with Brian Moran, head of the Virginia Democratic Legislative Caucus. Jerome graciously introduced Brian to our crew, and Brian also gave us a very nice interview for the project.
Governor Warner stood at the event all day greeting people who stood in line to see him. Sometimes the line seemed like it was an hour long. Here's the Governor greeting a few supporters:
Even when it started raining--pretty hard--the Governor kept at it, though with a little additional support!
After our group interview, Jim Webb showed up, and we got a few minutes on camera with him. I'll be posting a brief clip from our interview soon--but in the meantime, a picture of Webb and notlarrysabato will have to do:
The rain started to come down pretty hard right afterward, and we took refuge in one of the tents that covered the food offerings. Thankfully for us, also taking refuge in the same tent was Jessica Vandenberg, Jim Webb's campaign manager! So we used the rain as an excuse to take her hostage and get her on camera--here with Reality Bites Back doing the honors. She was really nice to us and extremely willing to help us out, and gave us some nice insights into the campaign.
And yes, Virginia--there actually was a pig at the pig roast, with fresh pulled pork. Yum. I submit as evidence the following picture of the chefs!
Our cameraman A.J. didn't get left out of the action--he got a picture with Governor Warner as well:
And just by way of letting you know how beautiful this area is: here's a shot of the Rappahanock river from the steep bank on the farm:
I'm in DC this morning, and just watched the Webb/Allen debate on MTP. hcc in va invited us to get down to Arlington to meet the debate-watching party, but we were up until 4am editing the footage from the roast :-) We're about to head over to Webb headquarters to meet Lowell Feld (lowkell). I'll write more later! Hope you're all enjoying the travelogue.
hekebolos
RBB
A.J.
Crashing The States