Someone might say this happened in the ballroom that night.
***
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Emily and Elaine slipped into a restroom off the lobby to dress. It took three women to help Elaine squeeze into her gown.
“Hold it! Hold it!” She took in a deep breath. “I hadn’t been in a gown since my prom.”
It had been a long time since she “acted like a lady.”
Less than three years earlier, Elaine had been living on the street. “I spent most of the time at the corner of 11th and M streets, sitting at a bus shelter, passing out at night and coming to in the morning,” she said. “I gave my children up for adoption, the younger ones.”
One day in 2006, Elaine looked up to see a woman she used to hang out with on the streets, but the woman looked different. The woman had on clean clothes.
“She had money, and she was going to the store,” said Elaine, now 54.
“She told me she went to N Street Village” in Northwest Washington, which calls itself a “community of empowerment and recovery for women.”
Elaine decided to go to N Street, as well. While she was living there and in treatment for her addiction, she also volunteered at the shelter, which was one of the reasons she was chosen, along with eight other women, to go to the ball.
Emily was one of those other women. She had come to N Street Village in 2006 “in a state of complete despair” after living years on the street as an addict. She had had guns held to her head. She had been assaulted. She had moved from a house, to a room, to an abandoned car that was colder than the air outside. She had stopped and started recovery programs.
“I was just tired. Plain tired,” recalled Emily, now 53. “Someone had told me about N Street years and years ago. One morning, I got up and I said, ‘I’m on my way.’ ”
At N Street, she found compassion, people who told her she was somebody.
It was the same thing Earl Stafford was telling his guests.
The minutes ticked up to the ball.
Elaine and Emily walked into the lobby. Someone snapped a photograph.
Emily would set that photo on her dressing table and look at it each morning afterward, reminding her that “miracles can happen every day.”
They stepped on the escalator and descended to the ballroom.
They gasped.
The tables were covered in fine linen. There was crystal and silver. And figurines made of white chocolate, trimmed in gold. For dinner, the women were served lobster tails and steak.
Their host moved through the room, thanking everyone for coming.
“It was just the who’s who of the everyday world,” Elaine said. “Some homeless. Some low-income. Some no-income. The inaugural ball for the people.”
***
In the midst of the crowd stood retired Capt. Alvin Shell Jr., a wounded war hero.
Alvin isn’t sure who put him on a list of wounded service members to receive an invitation to the ball. “My wife and I had never been to anything like it before.”
Alvin was injured in Iraq in 2004 after his platoon was called to provide cover for a convoy hit by a roadside bomb. Gas was pouring down the street, drenching the soldiers. That’s when Iraqis shot a rocket-propelled grenade.
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