We're less than 50 days away from the Mother of all Inaugurations (maybe that was Andrew Jackson's), and there is an almost unquenchable thirst throughout the country to participate, to celebrate, to possess the moment and relish it.
Is the Inaugural Committee doing enough to slake this thirst? Certainly the Inauguration will be on more "platforms," on terrestrial television, on satellite channels, streaming through the Internet, on YouTube, close to ubiquitous.
And if the Committee is like the rest of the incoming administration, it's some talented, diverse equivalent of Edward R. Murrow, Walt Disney and Cecil B. DeMille. But there seems to be a dimension missing.
What's absent, or at least hasn't been announced, is a nationally distributed opportunity to have the joy of the crowd and the experience of mass engagement anticipated by the more than a million people who will be traveling to Washington.
Because extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, here's a suggestion to the Obamites as they engage with a population seeped in the prospect of rapture.
Take a technologic and entrepreneurial leaf from Peter Gelb's innovation with the Metropolitan Opera. His brilliant impresario-move, Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD, spread live performance transmissions to movie theaters and noble halls across North America, Europe, and Japan, playing to a (paying) audience (now approaching or exceeding a million people.
The Obama White House can create a series of public opportunities like this: an event that can provide close to a communal and civic experience for tens of millions (in communities across the country and around the world).
Maybe it should be "live." Or maybe it should be a reprise performance that Inauguration evening -- replaying the speech and covering the post-Inauguration events. It should have material that is exclusive and fabulous. Like the Met performances, it can be distributed in high resolution to public venues like Times Square. Communities should suggest sites such as parks, screens on buildings and, if possible reflections in the sky. And of course, there's the global.
The Inaugural Committee could do it themselves -- or enlist the the Public Broadcasting Service and the network of local PBS outlets (that would be another great signal from the incoming Administration).
Here's the sense the Met seeks to convey in its live events as put by Julie Borchard-Young, the Met executive: "Our goal with these broadcasts is to take you to the event, to give you the whole ambiance -- from orchestral tune-ups and patrons mingling in the theater to the actual performance... In our first two seasons of broadcasts, we've discovered that our HD audience behaves a lot like the crowds at the Met. They cheer and applaud. They talk to each other during intermissions. They treat it as a special event. It's just not the same as sitting home watching."
If the Metropolitan Opera can do it, Barack Obama can as well. Why not bring the Inauguration live via HD to a theater near you. Why shouldn't millions of people around the country have the simultaneous experience of seeing the United States, after a long, long wait, joyously turn the page.
This post is inspired by a suggestion from Helen Horowitz, the Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor of History at Smith College.