Sarah Palin’s Regional Tour

April 17th, 2010
by Danielle Crittenden
FrumForum

It’s useful to glimpse celebrities doing the regional circuit: Away from the flattering lights of Broadway or Hollywood, you see what kind of performer they are. Can they handle a stripped down stage and a drunken heckler?

I was thinking this as I watched Sarah Palin “perform” in a “hospitality center,” called Carmen’s Banquet Hall, on Thursday night in the suburbs of Hamilton, Ontario, a steeltown about 45 minutes west of Toronto.

The event was a charity fundraiser for inner-city Hamilton kids. My father and I attended as guests of the Toronto Sun newspaper, a sponsor of the event. Palin collected a fee somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000 (according to which press report you read) for a speech, book-signing, and VIP photo-session. Some 900 people paid $200 per plate to hear Palin speak and to bid on Palin-phanalia: signed posters; McCain-Palin election flotsam; personalized Sarah Palin vintages of Ontario wine; and the big prize, the actual upholstered seats from which she and an interviewer would take questions after the speech. (The seats ultimately sold for C$3400.)

A thick police presence safeguarded Palin against the one lone protestor. He carried a placard, “Honk for our healthcare.” No one honked.

We parked and joined a sea of guests dressed to the nines, as if for a wedding. Palin had issued elaborate advance rules: No jeans. No cameras or recording devices during the speech. (It was permitted to photograph her as she drifted through the lobby.) No questions from the media during the question and answer portion of the evening.

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