WASHINGTON - Bill Clinton received an elegant bash with Barbra Streisand. The senior George Bush enjoyed a lavish soiree with Frank Sinatra. The new Bush administration? It gets a party with cattle standing around a ballroom.
After delays caused by the election dispute, the Presidential Inaugural Committee's star-studded gala - a fancy affair traditionally held the night before the presidential swearing-in - has been canceled for the first time in memory. So now President-elect George W. Bush is left with just the "Black Tie and Boots" ball, a party that the Texas State Society sponsors at every inauguration.
This time, the Texas event is the only official pre-inaugural party around - certainly the only one featuring snorting livestock.
Casper, a 2,200-pound Texas Brahman, may not know it, but he has nabbed one of the hottest tickets in town. The steer from La Grange, Texas, whose owner rescued him from a slaughterhouse years ago so that he could work corporate parties, will carry formally dressed friends of the president-elect on his back and pose for pictures.
Many extravagant balls will still be held the next night, the evening of the inauguration - but not without heroic efforts as party organizers struggle to complete 11 weeks of work in less than half the time. All around Washington, organizers are trying frantically to recover from the election dispute, kicking into overdrive for the Jan. 20 inauguration.
"We are optimists," Jeanne Johnson Phillips, a Dallas businesswoman who is directing the Inaugural Committee, said at a news conference yesterday when asked if she could complete the inauguration plans in one month.
As for presiding over an inaugural from an office that opened only on Monday, she vowed: "There are no difficulties. Only opportunities."
And so, after 36 days during which the nation fought over who would be its president, the party is finally on. At the Inaugural Committee headquarters here yesterday, staff members rushed to settle on themes, music, food and festivities that they hope won't alienate anybody in the aftermath of the divisive election.
Parade specialists at Hargrove Inc., in Lanham, which has been involved in the set design of every inaugural since 1949, are proposing that the committee recycle old floats to save time. City workers are hurrying to finish the face-lift for the parade route down Pennsylvania Avenue, repaving the street and erecting viewing stands.
