So in 1996, I was at Oklahoma State doing some grad work, and I was a member of a club (Latin Dancing and Cultural Club) that was going to be marching in the homecoming parade. I remember it was 1996 because all the floats and groups were snaked through a residential area in some sort of pattern waiting for their turn to go, and there was a Young Democrats float so I went over to get a Clinton/Gore sticker. Not a minute later, Jim Inhofe rides by on a horse. I go to the faculty advisor of our club who is taking pictures and tell her, "I'm going to ask Inhofe for a photo, put this sticker on his horse's saddle blanket, and you take it. She was all for it. Unfortunately, there was a kid with the Inhofe campaign standing next to the advisor waiting to give me a Inhofe sticker. So picture was taken, shake hands with Jim, get the sticker from the kid, and I walk around the horse and put the sticker on that side of the blanket. My hope was he would ride through the parade stumping for Clinton. Unfortunately, he rode over to where some marchers for a state republican candidate were, and they found it. And he immediately turned his horse around to come back to our group just as we were given the go-ahead to move out. I would have been easy to pick out - I was the only gringo in the club, and I had a bright orange mustache - but I was hunched down on the side of the truck that was part of our group, giggling and peeking through the windows at him standing up in his saddle, scanning the group for me with a pissed-off look on his face.
It could have ended there.
A few years later, I had decided I really wanted a job and left grad school and moved to Tulsa. A swing club (remember swing making a comeback in the late 90s?) was having a Latin dance weekend so some friends and I went both nights, including the lessons they were giving beforehand. (Sidenote: If your instructor is Hispanic/Latin, salsa was invented in the country of his or her heritage) A woman I didn't know showed up both nights as well. First night she said, "You look very familiar. I can't remember names, but I never forget a face." Second night, "Did you ever put a democratic sticker on a republican horse?" I thought maybe she had gone to OSU and had seen me do it though I thought there wasn't anyone near me. But no. She had just moved from Florida a few weeks ago, and apparently someone in some level of "the press" had taken my picture, and they put it on the wires, and her local paper had put it in their humor/human interest section.
TlalocW
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