Frigid Washington Breaks the Ice With Pre-Oath Festivities

WASHINGTON — A wicked wind was blowing around the Washington Monument, and even the industrial-strength heaters inside the Technology Playground weren’t enough to warm Shannon Sardella.

“I’ve never been this cold in my life. I’m freezing. My toes are frozen,” said the 17-year-old Reseda resident, who had borrowed a red fleece hat and overcoat for her visit to the 53rd presidential inauguration.

But even the most frigid blast of winter couldn’t deter her mission on the National Mall: “I wanted to be part of the last inauguration of the century,” she said.

The inauguration festivities began in earnest Saturday with a dizzying array of events that will culminate Monday with President Clinton’s swearing-in for a second term, the traditional parade and 14 official balls that, for one night, will transform the nation’s usually sedate capital into a genuine party town.

Indeed, inauguration mania has already brought out the zanier side of life in Washington.

One hotel erected an exhibit honoring “Socks Clinton,” featuring a sushi buffet, smoked salmon hors d’oeuvres and a hand-painted replica of the First Cat bellied up to the bar (gazing at a mouse martini). Another hotel committed 340 hours of labor to sculpting near-life-size busts of America’s five surviving presidents--out of pure chocolate.

Republican activists, displaying a sense of mischief and a yearning to avoid social oblivion, planned their own version of an inauguration bash, dubbed “Mourning in America.” Organizer Marc Thiessen gamely predicted: “We’ll have a lot to celebrate in 2000.”

For hordes of others, however, the celebrating began Saturday, with thousands of bundled-up sightseers trekking through the ice-cold Mall, where the windchill factor plunged as low as 13 degrees below zero.

Inside seven heated tents, they could take refuge at free events and shows where they could watch Elmo, the furry celebrity of Sesame Street, along with other entertainers, perform for the kids, sample barbecued tofu (among other cuisine) in the American Kitchen Pavilion, boogie to Cajun music in Harmony Hall, and compose computer messages to the president in the Technology Playground.

At dusk, the crowd was treated to a giant fireworks display that lit up the sky with tiny gold, pink and blue stars fired from 10 different locations. Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton watched from the south portico of the White House.

Then Clinton planned to work more on his inaugural speech. But his wife dropped in on the Millennium Ball, a $100-per-ticket fund-raiser for the Clinton Birthplace Foundation. The crowd roared when she took to the stage during a performance by the Coasters.

Throughout the day, there was no shortage of references to the future, a theme that hovers over the entire inauguration celebration and has captured the imagination of Clinton and his advisors as they prepare his speech.

The president has come to view the approaching turn of the century as a key to the significance of this inauguration, White House aides say, a theme that dovetails with the inauguration slogan, “An American Journey.”

“What he’s trying to do is be a little more contemplative and perhaps a little more poetic” than in previous remarks, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said earlier this week, adding that Clinton was hoping listeners to his speech would feel “excited about our future and eager to build it.”

Clinton spent part of Saturday working on the remarks, poring over speeches of his predecessors and paying special attention to the second inaugurations of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, according to McCurry.

Discussing the speech in a Washington Post interview published today, Clinton said he anticipates a new season of cooperation with Congress that he hopes to usher in with remarks designed to “help flush the poison from the atmosphere.”

The president also spent part of the day hosting a brunch and a lunch for friends who have traveled to Washington for the inauguration.

The White House, of course, was a destination for only a few of the visitors to the capital; people are partaking of the three-day celebration in many different ways.

A Dallas couple dished out $30,000 for a four-night “Presidential Package” at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, featuring such luxuries as a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, breakfast in bed and “his and hers” gold-embroidered bathrobes sporting images of the Democratic donkey.

“I know they’re attending all the right balls, with all the right people,” said Ellen Gale, a hotel spokeswoman.

For other sightseers, it was the varied, family-oriented program on the Mall that represented an inaugural high point.

“The girls are more excited about Elmo than seeing Clinton on Monday,” said Janis Fisher, who brought her daughters Meagan, 7, and Melissa, 5, from Baltimore to witness the festivities.

Still others were simply enjoying the pomp and circumstance of yet another democratic milestone--the peaceful start of a new administration.

“It’s easy to get mired in the politics and say, ‘Here we go again,’ ” said Jeanne Romilly, a 43-year-old Washington homemaker waiting to get a haircut less than a block away from the White House. “We might get jaded because we live here, but it’s still a big deal for those who come here to celebrate the process itself. We have to remind ourselves sometimes that the White House is still a universal symbol of freedom.”

A pair of Washingtonians emerging from a White House brunch with the Clintons drew a contrast between this year’s celebration and the one four years ago.

“We now have a mature president,” said 52-year-old Roger Ruckman, a pediatric cardiologist whose wife, Kathy Ruckman, 49, was a Wellesley College classmate of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

While 1993’s inauguration was a “young, innocent celebration,” in which, it seemed, the nation eagerly joined, this year’s event feels more intimate, more, well, presidential, Roger Ruckman said.

Just a few blocks away, Bill Nye, the “Science Guy” of public television fame, was performing for a standing-room-only crowd as a chill wind invaded the Millennium Schoolhouse, dousing the candle flame he needed for an experiment. Nye said he felt “pretty lame” about the problem, but his audience remained enthusiastic.

Among the day’s more popular pastimes was composing e-mail to Clinton or Vice President Al Gore inside the Technology Playground (although the only guaranteed readers were those in the pavilion who watched on a big video screen). By the end of the day, 7,000 messages had been sent, said a spokesman for America Online, which declined to display any missives deemed inappropriate.

Times staff writers Melissa Healy, D’Jamila Salem-Fitzgerald, Greg Norman and Mimi Avins contributed to this story.