Gordon Peterson's Hillary Clinton Story

(picture taken in mid-January 2001).

One of the things that's interesting about having the look I have is that people DO tend to remember meeting me. ;-) This is the story about when my friend Clayton and I met Hillary Clinton, and what happened afterwards....!

Here's the story:

On the back cover of Hillary Clinton's book, "Living History", is a picture of Hillary and Bill from when they first met back in the 1970's. Hillary had wire-rim glasses and looked a little like Mary Travers (from Peter, Paul and Mary). Bill had just come back from Cambridge... and had hair to his shoulders and a full beard... he looked GREAT!!! :-)

So Clayton and I decided we needed to meet Hillary. While she was in town for her book signing tour, we waited about an hour and a half in line before we finally got up to where she was. Although we had been told that we could not engage her in conversation, I still asked her:

"As someone who fell in love with a bearded, longhaired man... who went on to become the President of the United States(!)... you realize better than most folks that the fact that a man has a beard and long hair doesn't mean that he'll never amount to anything. :-) ...Have you ever considered supporting legislation to prevent job discrimination against men with beards and long hair... which is, after all, the way God INTENDED AND WANTED for adult men to look!?"

She looked at us both for a moment, and then said, "You know... NOBODY has EVER asked me THAT question before!"

We exchanged a few other pleasantries, we got our signed book, and she thanked us for coming. :-)

We figured that, like all major politicians who meet a lot of people, it would probably be "in one ear, out the other". But it did seem anyhow that we had gotten her attention with our question.

About six months later, we were at a friend's party. As we were grazing the buffet one last time before heading home, the television was on in the corner, and nobody really paying much attention to it, but then it caught our attention with: "Next up on CBS.... DAVID LETTERMAN!" Clayton piped up and said, "Hey! Hillary is supposed to be on David Letterman tonight!" So we decided to stick around a bit, to see what she would say... since we had enjoyed meeting her.

So David Letterman comes out, does his monologue, and goes to first station break. When he came back, he held up her book and introduced her. They started talking about her book and her national book-signing tour. (This is basically where the video clip starts).

We of course had NO idea that she would mention us, (just imagine how amazed we were!) but we thought that it was really cool that, six months later:

she remembered meeting us;
she remembered the topic we talked with her about; and
out of some 100,000 people she met on her tour, Clayton and I were the two that stood out in her mind to tell David Letterman, on-air, about having met!! :-)

Anyhow, one of the women at the party had a 6-foot satellite dish in her back yard, and went home and got a copy of the show off the Denver feed and sent the video clip to me for my web site. Since then, I have also gotten videotapes from friends in San Francisco, and even from Sao Paulo, Brazil when the show aired there a few weeks later... complete with subtitles in Portuguese...!

So anyhow, now that you know the story, I hope that adds to your enjoyment of the video clip.

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