Lemondrop

I heard about the Jon Stewart rally on the Washington Mall this weekend (so big they're still debating attendance), the Huffington Post's free bus rides there, and POW, I was on board immediately.

The buses were scheduled to pull out from New York's Citi Field at 6 a.m., so I thought it would be prudent to drink my face off until 2:30 the morning of.

At Citi Field, my opening minutes on-site were auspicious. Seeking to get a better vantage to shoot from, I climbed up onto a garbage can. As I dismounted, the can tipped over and I fell flat on my back in front of about 2,000 people. I immediately bounced up, shot my arms up in a victory gesture and got some applause. Broke my glasses, but they're still wearable; I'll have to tape the frames. The camera was the important thing, and it was fine.

I followed Arianna Huffington around the parking lot as she walked the length of the massive line. That was classy of her, I thought, mingling with all the commoners. Arianna, her minions, and the journo types got on her bus around 7 a.m. She immediately walked the length of the bus and handed out... pistachios.

It was all I ate from 4:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Huffington Post also provided Greek yogurt, but no spoons, so some of this yogurt wound up on, rather than in, people's gobs. A wire-service photographer on the bus won the award for best anecdote -- about the time he set a cabbie on fire. (The cabbie had cut him off, so he pulled up next to him, flicked his lit cigarette butt into the cabbie's window, and when he peered into his rearview mirror as he pulled away he saw the cabbie furiously slapping his sweater.)

What I will remember most about the bus ride, however -- the most salient feature of that journey -- was the toilet. The toilet did a thing that I have never seen a toilet do. The toilet had a kind of dyslexia. Somehow, rushing air was being channeled up and out of the toilet from outside, so any liquids introduced into the basin immediately formed into a four foot geyser, dousing the rim, the floor, and the occupant. On our bus ride to the Rally for Sanity, we all pissed into the wind, literally if not metaphorically. I was sitting in the back row, so I felt responsible, even though I was not the saboteur. For the men, it was bad; for the women ... maybe it would be best if we all stood for a moment of silence.

Anyway, I took some pictures down there. Maybe you'd like to have a look.

Arianna dispensing nuts on the bus. Thoughtful gestures and sensitivity to other people's needs were a common theme at the rally, and on the bus ride down. I took the pistachios, but would have preferred almonds. Yay, almonds! Boo, urine-spewing toilets!


Arianna was very good about pressing the flesh, rallying troops and not being a misanthrope. Seeing a high-class lady mingling with the rest of us made me anxious. For example, what if someone asked her a retarded question?


So embarrassing. I was wearing the same tie.


Nice abs, bro.


I wonder what kind of tea they were drinking when they decided on these costumes.


This was taken from the steps of the National Gallery and was but a tiny cross-section of the crowd. Whooooo boy! Today they're estimating attendance at 215,000 -- as guesstimated by an aerial camera, with a margin of error of 10 percent. Hey, with a spread like that, don't we all live in "purple" states?


Stephen Kosloff is hard at work on a coffee table book about outhouses. In his spare time, he is a freelance writer and photographer who has written for The New York Times, Gawker, Time Out New York, the New York Post, and The Cambodia Daily. His photographs have been published by The New York Times, Interview Magazine, Paper Magazine, Gawker, CNN, Huffington Post, Time Out New York, Media Bistro, Brooklyn Vegan, Organizing for America and Resource Magazine.