Design inauguration posters and eat cupcakes at the Love Cafe

LOCATION: Love Cafe, across from Cake Love (corner of 15th and U St) TIME: Leading up to the inauguration; they're open till 11pm every night EQUIPMENT: Yourself OPTIONAL: Extra art supplies, but they provide posters, poster sticks, markers, and glitter

This is a message from Warren Brown, the owner of Cake Love (about whose cupcakes with butter frosting, this Moby-Dick reader is tempted to use leviathan-worthy superlatives):

"I hope that everyone is enjoying the holiday season. In preparation for the Inauguration, please join me and other members of our DC community for a community art party at Love Cafe during the week leading up to Jan. 20th. In Praise or Protest will be a free week long poster party. We'll supply the materials, you make the art. Come down to Love Cafe from 1/12 - 1/19 and make your own poster for the Inauguration Parade that is In Praise or Protest of Dubya. I have a few designs I'd like him to see. We'll have markers, poster board, posts, tape, glitter, waterproofing spray... it'll be fun. Let's take democarcy in action to the parade on signs with personal messages to show our leadership - and the television viewers watching from the comfort of their homes - the issues that we feel are important. Please join us and make your mark on a poster - then march it up and down Pennsylvania Ave. on Jan. 20th."

I stopped by tonight for a poster-making gathering hosted by the ubiquitous Sarah Ingersoll and my splendiferously lovely friends Jamia, Kaelan, and Natalie all showed up. (Oh, how did I get to know such wonderful people? They are all so spunky & adorable & smart & good & deep & charming & generous. Why am I so lucky?? I think I must prove the trope that pleasure is just a contrast with pain, because I spent years in school as a social pariah, a greasy-haired, sulky, semi-autistic gothed out rebel, with gangs of girls ambushing me in the bathrooms to beat me up and my classmates drawing cruel satires of my pimply face on the chalkboards, and I used to think that I just sort of wasn't ever going to be able to make friends, like my brain was missing the friendship-making bit - and so now, that my friends actually like me and don't want to beat me up, I don't think the novelty is ever going to get old.)

Anyway, I'd never actually been inside the Love Cafe, but it's a charming venue, with comfy booths and tea and coffee and delicious pastries, and a vase full of peacock feathers on the counter (a design element which I thoroughly approve). If you take your poster up to the counter and show them, they'll give you a certificate for a free cupcake.

I made a poster with a sort of 60s-inspired design with swirly letters: "SQUISH BUSH," and Natalie helped me think of some accompanying chants:

"Squish Bush!
Push him in the tush!
Squish Bush!
Turn him into mush!
Squish Bush!
He's a big douche!"

(That last bit doesn't exactly rhyme, but the sugar in the butter frosting was getting me a little over-excited.)