In the Gallery

Written by Andrew Horn of Amherst, NH.

Read Part Four: Election of the Speaker here.

I wake up around 7:30 a.m., well before session starts at 10 a.m. But anxiety gets the better of me, and I scroll YouTube shorts until the Clerk bellows, “Members take their seats!” I step into the shower with Rev. Beniste praying on my phone through the steam.

I throw on slacks, dress shoes, a button-down shirt, white socks, and a nice brown hoodie. A journalist doesn’t have to get too dressed up, right? I tell myself. I don’t have a dress jacket anyway. It’s fine.

I get in my car during the nomination speeches, fighting with my 5G to wring out each word. Arriving, I go up two flights of stairs, passing chatting suits wearing “lobbyist” name tags along the way. I struggle to follow the nomination speeches in my earbuds. I enter the gallery, fuller than I was expecting, loose open seats here and there.

I immediately feel under-dressed. Most others seem dressed for church. Memo to self: Buy nicer clothes.

I enter with Rep. Sherman Packard accepting his Speaker nomination in my earbuds and the Clerk speaking at the dais in real life. I hastily remove my earbuds.

The staff direct me to an open row in the middle section, behind the AV person. I squeeze by a woman, sit, and quickly root through my backpack, producing a sketchpad and a disposable fountain pen to scribble thoughts and observations.

One of the people in front of me wears a pungent additive for the occasion, and, thankfully, they leave soon after I arrive.

I switch my phone from House proceedings to Senate, for the Senate begins Organization Day at 10 a.m as well. I flip between House in person and Senate on YouTube as the action allows. I notice a political mover in the row ahead of me who spent a lot of the time in my field office during the campaign. They never say hi to me; I never say hi to them.

It’s warm in the gallery, and I quickly take off my brown hoodie. I assume it’s because the floor of legislators is full and because heat rises, but eventually I see a woman legislator leaning against a window, fanning herself with a House calendar. So, it’s just warm.

“Ah, I’m stuck on the seat. Thank you,” I hear behind me. After the uneventful nomination phase with Rep. Kim Rice unexpectedly nominating Rep. Packard for Speaker, spectators steadily stream out, eventually leaving only a few diehards. There are myself, some people with laptops at the railing, a Representative’s daughter who I know quite well, and a half-dozen young men in suits, all sitting in a row.

From the gallery, the ceiling is prominent. Golden chandeliers of three or six bulbs apiece. Vegetative capitals topping the columns between us in the gallery and the chair. Curious no smoking signs at either end of the gallery, which remind me of old back-lit no smoking signs above every seat in an airplane. I imagine people in the distant past smoking up there, in defiance of the newly installed signs.

And now, writing this, I frantically look for evidence of these no smoking signs in my notes or in online pictures. Virtually all the pictures I find are either of the Greek amphitheater of New Hampshire House seats from above or below, of the golden New Hampshire Capitol dome, or of some other deliberative body’s chamber. Coming up short on finding hard evidence of those pesky no smoking signs, I resign myself that perhaps they only live in my imagination.

Five oil portraits look down on the 400 legislator seats, Washington in the center, Lincoln standing guard over the legislators’ entrance.

Five dead white men, haunting the chamber, framed in gold, off-white pillars punctuating the walls all around, separating each painting from the others, off-white vaulted ceilings, off-white walls, a pattern only broken by the wooden chair, dais, and well in the front of the chamber and the 400 wood-backed, brown, upholstered, folding theater seats that fill the floor.

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Part Six coming soon…