Day 11
Posted on: May 8, 2004No Comments
 Getting up at 6:30 to go up and shower in Joel’s hotel room was certainly a difficult chore for me to do, but I had to do it. We all had to get up early and go to the Hartford Expo Center where the second DeafNation Expo of our tour was scheduled to happen. We needed to be there even earlier than normal because we were going to park our RV inside the building so everybody could get a good look at the RV and see what we’re all about.
Once we parked the RV inside the building, I had to go outside to the side of the RV facing the entire Expo and scrub the huge splatter of bird poop that a Goose beautifully placed from 450 feet in the air. The RV must be a nice big target to aim for when flying up high. After I washed the poop off, we all got ready for our second expo in seven days. Since both Expos are basically the same, and the same things we had seen in Indianapolis were here as well, we could do and discover different things.
One of the coolest things about the Expo today was that in the other half of the Expo building, the Connecticut State Democratic Convention was taking place at the same time as our Expo was happening. Senator Chris Dodd was at the convention giving a big speech and rallying the crowd. After his speech, he made a quick stop at our Expo and stood on stage briefly before Matthew “Magic” Morgan’s magic show to wave at the crowd and smile for the cameras. After his brief stint on stage, I was fortunate enough to be given a brief interview with Senator Dodd.
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Kevin, for instance, went on a mission to meet as many different people as he could who knew his father, Edward Dawson. Kevin’s dad is an American School for the Deaf alumni and he was one of the greatest athletes the school has ever seen. Yearbooks which Kevin discovered only yesterday show pages and pages of game summaries where his dad was the leading scorer or where he scored the winning touchdown. Since it was his first time in Connecticut since he moved out of the state as a toddler, Kevin wanted to find out as much as he could about his father through his former classmates. There certainly wasn’t any shortage of people who vividly remembered his father, because by the end of the day, there were 20 people crowding around Kevin at the VRS booth where people could make free VRS calls. They were all crowded around Kevin, each taking their 20 second turn to quickly say “hi” to Kevin’s mom who had a ball chatting with all of Ed’s old classmates.
I was surrounded by more than six people with dark suits who worked for Senator Dodd and while waiting my interview with him, Ryan Drajewicz, Dodd’s staff assistant, turned and signed to me. I was startled that one of the suits could sign, and rather well, and I later found that his parents were Deaf. He asked me a few questions about our road trip, and before we could continue talking, Dodd was rushed off stage and towards me where he looked tired and hurried. I shook his hand amid flashes of light bulbs and Senator Dodd, our cameraman Branic Keltz, and myself were totally encased by Dodd’s security detail. I asked Dodd what he thought of the fact that right next door to the Connecticut Democratic Convention, the same amount of people, all deaf, were attending an Expo. Dodd’s initial response was that he knew nothing about our expo at all until just now, but I went on to ask him how he felt now that he knew. He
