It didn’t start out this way – a national event, with news interest from all over, and Ted Nugent coming out to the stage for an audio check around midday, and goofing around, doing a mini-performance for an appreciative crowd. We were going to have a Tea Party, very much like all the other Tea Parties in the six or seven hundred other cities, suburbs and towns that were planning them. We expected having something like the very first Alamo Plaza tea party, which occurred around the end of February, and seems to have gone pretty much unnoticed in the grand national scheme of things. A lot of the foundation work was done on line in February and early March, on Facebook – which was networking those interested in Tea Party protests in the San Antonio area. The San Antonio Tea Party outgrew Facebook about the middle of March, when an old milblogging compadre (and fan of The Daily Brief) got involved. Robin J. is also retired Air Force – he even got a group of San Antonio-area bloggers together for a picnic in McAllister Park a couple of years ago. The other prime Tea Party instigator wanted to concentrate on the Boerne Tea Party, so she offhandedly asked Robin if he would take over responsibility for San Antonio’s. Robin set up a website, drew in some more interest, including that of another military veteran, Eric A. Eric runs what another SA Blogger, the Fat Guy, would call “a tiny bidness”, producing videos – mostly of weddings. Eric whipped together a quick video promo for a San Antonio Tea Party, launched it on YouTube… and managed to get attention paid to it by Glenn Beck, who hinted that he would love to come and broadcast live from Alamo Plaza, if we were going to hold our Tea Party there.

I would like to point out that since I do not watch Fox (or listen to Rush Limbaugh, either) I had managed to not know a single solitary thing about him. The first couple of times his name was mentioned, I had him mixed up with Jeff Beck and I thought in passing that it was rather cool that there was another outspoken conservative rock musician other than Ted Nugent. As someone who will doubtless wind up on Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security watch-list, I fear I have rather let my credentials as a deranged extremist lapse. I spend as much time as possible in the 19th century, I much prefer classical music and I get most of my news online, through wicked, racist and right-wing sinks of iniquity like Instapundit and Rantburg.

Robin had already emailed me about doing media releases for the Tea Party, and shortly after Eric A. had set off an explosion of interest in a Tea Party in Alamo Plaza – I went to a special meeting of the organizing committee. This would have been on the last Sunday in March. Somehow, I had found myself being the media expert in all of this. This would be the first face-to-face meeting for most of us, having heretofore conducted most of our plotting on line, through emails and telephone calls. There were a couple of gentlemen from the 9-12 Project, who were interested in what we all acknowledged to be a madly optimistic notion to have the Tea Party in Alamo Plaza. I have to confess that we all saw it as a long shot. Fiesta would begin the following day; San Antonio’s massive two-week-long civic blow-out would pretty much scotch any effort to secure the Plaza for a date which was then a little more than two weeks off. There would be permission from the city; the logistics would be a nightmare, Glenn Beck had only hinted at coming to San Antonio – eventually we agreed that realistically, we should look at another venue. We already had secured the use of a small downtown city park, but in the interests of having a larger crowd and somewhat more media interest than we had bargained for, we agreed to consider some other venues; Alamo Stadium and some other places with generous parking and sufficient facilities. Three or four of the attending planning members agreed to check out that availability. There was a public meeting following the organizing committee, on the terrace of a restaurant which was closed on a Sunday afternoon. There were 130 people there – and that was when it all got rather interesting.

(to be continued. I’ll get to the part about Ted Nugent, eventually)