From the Producers Blog Glenn visits people waiting in line at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night (more) |
GLENN: From Washington D.C., 25 hours away now from Restoring Honor, what a wild 24 hours this has been since last we met. Things here in Washington are getting quite bizarre and quite intense, and intense in a good way, bizarre in a just, I don't even know how to explain it. Just a, it's weird. History is going to be made this weekend in Washington. We've been telling you that we don't know how many people are coming. We have built it and I think the area that we have JumboTrons and sound in is, if it fills in, is between 450,000 and 500,000, and we you know, we've been expecting, I don't even know, maybe 100,000. We said when we first started if we could get, you know, 100,000, that would be great. Who knows. Maybe we get 25,000. But the press has gone from it's only going to be a handful of people to 100,000 earlier this week, and the press here in Washington, I don't know if you are seeing it in outside of Washington, but the press here in Washington is now predicting a crowd of possibly 500,000 people. So you can put that into perspective, the largest gathering on the mall of all time was 700, outside of Obama, 700?
STU: Yeah, non I think, and I have this list somewhere, people of noninaugurations because those are usually the biggest, and I think Obama was the biggest of the biggest.
GLENN: And I think the other one was like the end of a war or something like that, wasn't it, and it was 700,000? Something like that. Inaugurations are the biggest, but Obama's was said to be three million. Then they downgraded it to what was it? How did they go?
PAT: Two million.
GLENN: Two million.
PAT: Then it was 1.7 million. And now everybody says it was about a million.
GLENN: About a million. There were 1600 buses with I don't remember the names of the bus companies, but they judge crowds in advance by buses. For Barack Obama the inauguration and the balls and everything else, there were 1,000 1600 of these buses. I think 3,000 total with all of the bus companies, but the one that they always, you know, go to and say this bus company is the biggest and blah, blah blah, and they judge and project the crowds, there were 1600 buses. There are the last I heard, there were about 1100 buses coming for this one. If those numbers stay stable, if that means anything, and I don't think it necessarily does, but this is the way they project crowds, it is going to be an enormous crowd and gathering tomorrow, enormous. It is there was an alert today from metro police which I'm told they only do like on storms and inaugurations that the subway system is going to be stressed and taxed and slowed, and expect long delays, expect massive traffic and streets to be closed, et cetera, et cetera. Which again I there is all, this is all just stuff that people who live here and work in the security world or the police world or whatever, they are the ones who have told me these things. So I don't know how accurate these things are. I did see that memo that went out.
PAT: There's a lot of people, though, in this town already.
GLENN: My gosh.
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