It was raining Saturday night in Washington, D.C. Given the heavy police presence outside the Washington Hilton, my wife Lea and I needed to walk the last two blocks to the entrance of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I gave her my tuxedo jacket, which she held over her head as we passed a dozen or so chanting protesters, flanked by security.
We reached a metal gate at the hotel entrance. A woman working the event checked our invitations, which we received via email. The invitations were JPEG email attachments stating that they were “strictly nontransferable.” They were not marked with our names.
Given the rain, I was glad that’s all it took to get inside. Looking back now, maybe I shouldn’t have been. A screenshot of that email could have gotten anyone in.
