Out to lunch

05 May 2009

I sat next to Roy R. Romer today at lunch. He looks much older now than in his Wikipedia picture, but that didn't stop all the important people in the Capital Hilton Congress Room from coming up to say hello. He didn't actually introduce himself to me, he only asked what I did and, no doubt trying to be genuinely conversational, asked this and that about TPR. But I knew who he was because Checker (who's real name is Chester E. Finn Jr.) gave a shout-out from the podium to his old friend Roy, and someone stopped by to congratulated him on his son's becoming another Senator Romer.

Roy R. Romer, by the way, was a congressman, a senator, the 39th governor of Colorado, the superintendent of Los Angeles' Schools, he has a school named after him in the San Fernando valley, and now he serves as the chairman and lead spokesman for Strong American Schools, currently funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad foundation, which is an initiative aimed at encouraging politicians to include education reform in their platforms.

But really, sitting next to Roy was nothing, I was in fact sitting in front of Checker the whole time, who was formerly the United States Assistant Secretary of Education and currently the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, who provided the luncheon.

I was there just to take notes on the speakers, but since the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation had been so kind as to provide the delicious and expensive box lunches, I helped my self to a grilled vegetable on tomato focaccia sandwich.

NOTE: Roy R. Romer eats his chocolate brownie with a fork, which is a much more sophisticated way of doing it, especially at a luncheon full of DC's leading lights in the field of education reform. I felt foolish for trying to eat it with my bare hands.