Last week, I had the honor of going to Montgomery to meet Lt Gov Kay Ivey and watch the special joint session she called for Hilik Bar (Deputy Speaker of the Knesset) to speak.
I was just tagging along, really. Av knew everyone and was doing his thing, and I was thinking ohmygosh this is so exciting because I’ve never seen government do its thing in person beyond that one time I was a juror for a case set around a car wreck that happened at a blistering 3MPH, and the other time I was a bit-player in a case between the company I worked for and another in Flowery Branch, Georgia.
There’s a crazy story about that case in Georgia. The company I worked for was owned by a corp in Canada. One of the lawyers, sent down from D.C., for the company I worked for noticed that I had a Louis Vuitton bag and requested that I not wear it up to the stand because they didn’t want the jurors to think that our corporate was big-city, as the lawyers for the other company were local, had nice thick accents, and wore seersucker suits. They actually said that. Seriously. Weak. Weak. Weak. I did giggle to myself, though, when I got on the stand and saw that the other lawyers did have great accents and did indeed, as forecasted, wear beautiful seersucker suits, just as my own husband does. How simple the company lawyers sent down were for thinking that the jurors would be swayed in some small way by a LV of all things.
Sigh. Oh, deep, deep, heavy sigh.
I felt a little out-of-place on this trip to Montgomery because I’m not political and don’t have that kind of interest really…but I made fast friends with someone new to me — a lobbyist from Mobile who spends much of her year in Washington. She had lots of interesting stories and was filling me in on what was going on. This was all second nature to her and I was just enthralled with seeing it all in action and hearing stories of other things going on in both cities.
Here in her office, Lt Gov Kay Ivey was presented with a specially crafted wooden box. My friend Sulynn who directs Black Belt Treasures in Camden was so happy when I sent her a pic of the print Ms Ivey has hanging in her office.
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We then went to the special viewing area, the balcony, of the House to watch the speech
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Later on we had a nice little lunch at the Capital Club downtown, where we took this pic. Also at our table was one of the state supreme court justices, and he was interesting too. I loved his sweet wife!
This is Hilik Bar, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, with me:
Here, the view of downtown from our dining room on the 21st floor of the RSA Tower (if you know, or are a member of ClubCorp, the Capital Club is one of its properties. We’ve been members of its Summit Club in Birmingham). It was such a pretty day and a thrill to get to see everything in action.
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For all the government classes I had in high school and college, I admit it’s Schoolhouse Rock that’s probably retained the most effortlessly: