Dropping The Ball

Gallery

A History of Inaugural Balls

It's not just the ball gowns that have evolved since the first presidential inaugural gala in 1809.

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Jimmy Carter realized the absurdity of the ball in 1977. He tried to scale back, way back. He tried to transform the event into something that made sense for the time. He renamed the balls "parties." He served pretzels and peanuts. He charged just $25 per ticket.

Everybody hated it.

Ronald Reagan swung the pendulum back in 1981, planning eight white-tie affairs and starting ticket prices at $100 apiece. An inaugural volunteer said the night was all about "dignity and class," though accounts of the time describe the balls as total madhouses.

At Reagan's 1985 inauguration, a seriously logjammed coat room resulted in Mink-gate. Several guests' outerwear went missing, including the $8,000 fur that Annandale resident Colleen Beveridge had borrowed from her mother-in-law for the occasion.

It capped off a so-so evening. "I'd expected a lavish buffet. Or some kind of buffet," said Beveridge in a recent interview. "It was kind of like going into the gym at a high school dance. Most people just stood around; no one danced. It wasn't what I expected."

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Of course, what we expect is something that may not be possible: an old-fashioned Madisonian fairy tale blended with a modern populist sensibility, in which everyone who wants to mingle with the president can come and mingle with the president.

It just doesn't work.

Does anybody dance anymore, aside from rabid "Dancing With the Stars" fans?

What is a "quadrille"?

Can I do it while wearing this repurposed bridesmaid dress? I know it's "persimmon"-colored. It's the only floor-length dress I have.

And still we have balls.

We have balls because we are a country of nostalgia and tradition, perhaps, or because we want to believe we are classier than we actually are.

Because even in this age of the first "Internet president," sometimes we want to experience things in real life.

Because Washington still has a social inferiority complex?

We cling, prospective ballgoer, because we have always had balls, because somewhere along the way we became more enthralled with the idea of them than by any actual enjoyment derived, because everyone in this nation of crazy optimists still thinks he or she will magically know how to samba, once the music starts again.