It was 5 p.m. when people streamed into David Blumberg's house on Falls Road, a sea of red glitter and black silk gowns. They had worked years for this night, often fruitlessly, and they did not arrive empty-handed; they offered casseroles, wine, and trays of desserts.
The celebration was about to begin.
But first Blumberg ran back upstairs to find a spare bow tie and an extra stud for two of his fellow Republicans. "We'll get better at this as time goes on," he joked.
This was the day they had hoped for, prayed for, and never allowed themselves to think would arrive: the inaugural of a Republican governor. After all the losses they'd suffered together in the Republican trenches, emerging each time as half-crazed loners in a city dominated by Democrats, they wanted to celebrate in an intimate gathering.
The buffet tables were elegantly set, and the house filled with the smells of the feast before them. All week, Ellie Wang, another devoted Republican and Blumberg's wife, had prepped her Chinese specialties and famous salmon. Their friend and fellow partisan, Carol L. Hirschburg, had labored hours in the kitchen, preparing tenderloin of beef. At the bar, champagne flowed.
Dinner was the evening's first stop, to be followed by the inaugural ball. It had taken 36 years, but finally, they had a place at the table.
These were the people who could say they knew Bob Ehrlich when: Hirschburg had once shared a beach house with him and his wife. Wang had cooked for his victory party. Blumberg, just moments before his wedding, had embraced his friend.
Some of the 30 guests at the Blumberg home last night had worked for the GOP for a quarter century. When Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. announced he was quitting Congress to run for governor, they winced. Not because they didn't like him; they did, but because they couldn't stand another loss.
The pre-ball dinner was Blumberg's idea. After 16 years as Republican Party chairman in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, he felt great joy and relief. He felt vindicated, really, though he wasn't gloating. He knew better. It has been 40 years since a Republican was elected mayor, 65 since one was elected to the City Council, his own try as futile as all the others.
For 29 years, Blumberg had knocked on doors, starting with the campaign of U.S. Sen. Charles McC. Mathias in 1974. He'd managed or been involved in 100 campaigns and could claim only four or five wins.
He knew how to steel himself. Kicked in the tail so often, he couldn't allow himself to think of victory. But defeat in this campaign would have been crushing. He was never more emotionally involved. He had known Ehrlich a long time, not just in politics, but as a friend. This was it: A candidate like him represented the GOP's greatest opportunity. Blumberg pushed himself to knock on doors, work the phones, accompany the candidate to the Fells Point festival. Many nights, though, he told his wife that this campaign would be his last; he couldn't take any more losses.
It scared him, trying to imagine a life without politics. On Election Day, when a reporter asked him a question before the outcome was known, he had started to cry. Naturally, then, he wanted to celebrate the big win with the people who had shared all the pain, too.
In the kitchen, Wang was slicing tenderloin. She loves to entertain, and she had staged a post-election party for Ehrlich the weekend before Thanksgiving. Her husband told Ehrlich at the party that the day of his election stood as the best day of his own life. Ehrlich corrected him: No, David, second best. Marrying Ellie was the best day of your life.
How could she not like such a guy? Gladly, she had taken her physical therapist clients, some of them unable to walk, to the polls on Election Day, never asking them how they would vote. And now, happily, she presided over the stove and over the beginning of a glorious night.
"It's such a wonderful celebration. We don't know what to expect. We haven't been through this before, but it's a way for the old guard, the Republicans who have worked so long, to celebrate," she said.
Hours earlier, she had dressed in a black jacket and long black skirt trimmed in fuschia. For days, she and her friends had talked about what to wear. A last-minute shopping spree had sent her back to the comfort of her own closet.
The strains of "I'm a Believer," by the Monkees, filled the dining room. The selection dated to 1966, the last time a Republican was elected governor.
In strolled Bob Scholz, a lawyer at Niles, Barton and Wilmer and a fund-raiser for Ehrlich. A central committee chairman in the mid-1980s, he had dropped back to fund-raising since the 1998 defeat of Ellen Sauerbrey, the low point for him. Four years earlier, he had run Richard D. Bennett's failed campaign for attorney general. "I enjoyed every single minute of it, but tonight most of all," he said.
There was David Tufaro, a Yale-educated lawyer and developer who had run against Martin O'Malley for mayor. Victor Clark, the outgoing city GOP chair who is being considered for a job in the new administration. Jeff Pritzker, who had vied in the recent GOP primary for attorney general, and Carol Arscott, former Howard County committee chair.
None was more ecstatic last night than dinner co-host Hirschburg, a consultant and public relations expert. "We are in a state of euphoria," she said. The question Republicans ask each other when they meet these days, she said, is, "Is your face breaking?" - from smiling so much.
A week ago, when the General Assembly opened for business, she and a gaggle of women friends ran into Ehrlich on the street in Annapolis and lunged at him - feeling compelled to shout "friend, not foe" to his bodyguard - and covered him in hugs.
"Republican groupies," Ehrlich had explained.
She couldn't help but think, "He's our governor. It's just so cool." This was somebody she had known for years, and everybody he was appointing, four deep into each department and agency, she knew as well.
Republicans, being small in number, all knew each other. She'd begun small, in 1975, working to publicize the minority viewpoint in Annapolis. Two years later, she started a GOP state Senate fund-raising operation.
She had met Ehrlich at a hotel pool in Dallas, at the GOP convention in 1984. She was communications director for the Reagan-Bush team; he was still two years away from winning a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates. Eventually, she would work for him - but not for money; only as a volunteer.
In 1993, Kendel Ehrlich invited Hirschburg and a couple of lawyers to share a house with the couple in Bethany Beach. Ehrlich was in the State House then, and Hirschburg was press secretary for the person she was nearly certain would be the first GOP governor: Ellen Sauerbrey. She was defeated in 1994 - by fewer than 6,000 votes.
While Ehrlich ran for Congress, Hirschburg worked the 1998 campaign for Sauerbrey, too, again thinking she would win. "I suffered intense disappointment," she said, "especially the first time. It was heartbreaking."
So heartbreaking, in fact, that she didn't join Ehrlich's campaign when he announced he would take on Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then 30 points ahead in the polls. She'd have to be emotionally involved, she said, and she couldn't take that kind of pain again. She did give the maximum $4,000, and she helped review Ehrlich's television advertising. But she stayed in the background until the last few months, when she sensed from talking with people in stores and in her neighborhood that he would win. Only then did she allow herself to work the phone banks.
And she threw an Ehrlich fund-raiser in the Democratic mayor's skybox at Camden Yards, which she had won at a silent auction.
The dress she wore for that auction, black with a red sparkling jacket, she wore last night, too. Hours earlier, she had watched her friend and new governor sworn in.
The small victories won along the way were nothing compared to this day. Like other guests at the Blumberg-Wang dinner, Hirschburg would celebrate long into the night, at post-inaugural ball parties in hotel suites across the city. But first, there was the main event. Though none of them had ever attended an inaugural ball, they knew it would be a night to remember.
Earlier in the day, Hirschburg got word that the place to be was Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the hastily arranged second ball after tickets to the Baltimore Convention Center sold out. All the way up the elevator to the club level of the baseball stadium, she smiled.
Dance music blared. Women in glittering shades of teal, beige and red, elegant but not royal, danced past the food lines.
She hadn't passed far from the coat check when she was enveloped by a hug from a long-time friend.
"There she is! Oh my god, you look gorgeous," she told Diane Baker, Ehrlich's deputy appointments secretary, in shimming gold on black. Baker had worked for Ehrlich eight years, she said, but still cried yesterday when she called him "governor" for the first time.
Moments later Hirschburg ran into old friend Terry Cox, the governor's new scheduler. A bevy of Howard County Republican committee members and a new state senator surrounded her, hugging, as she helped herself to a glass of white wine at one of the bars that lined the hallway.
She sang and danced in place. Next came kisses from Joe DeFrancis, the race track owner, and Alan Rifkin, the lawyer. Past the tiny dance space in the Cy Young Lounge, she screamed when she saw Trent Kittleman, the new deputy secretary for transportation and a good friend. "This is so much fun," she said. "I'm seeing everybody I know."
Turning, she ran into Jody Kallis, a colleague dating back to her first job in 1970 keeping track of bills in the General Assembly.
Dizzying crowds, in tuxedos and long dresses spun of gold silk and black velvet, part of the largest GOP party Baltimore has seen since Spiro T. Agnew was elected governor in 1966, pressed the hallways.
The governor would be coming from a private reception for big contributors. Hirschburg had declined her invitation to that party, preferring to toast with the people she had worked beside for so long. All these years they had been outsiders, clinging to each other for support in the face of defeat. Now they would know everybody: department heads, assistant secretaries, chiefs of staff.
Now they were the inner circle.