My dynamite reporting skills have paid off once again. I was sitting in a chair at Minneapolis City Hall on Wednesday minding my own business and waiting for the next meeting to start.
Then Mayor R.T. Rybak sat down and started to talk:
“So here’s the real back story on the stage diving,” he said, referring to the Election Night party crowd-surfing with his mother, Lorraine, that got folks talking.
Says the mayor:
“A number of months ago, my mother said to me, ‘Oh, gosh, if Obama wins and those amendments go down, are you going to stage dive?”
“And I said, ‘No, Mom, I think I’m going to retire that. I’m getting a little too old for this.’
“And she said, ‘I’m not too old, and you shouldn’t be too old. I should do it.’
“I kinda laughed and didn’t think much about it from my 84-year-old mother.”
“A couple of weeks later, she said, ‘I’m serious.’
“And I said, ‘No Mom, you’re not doing it.’ ”
“And she kept coming back week after week. She said, ‘Count on me. I’m going to stage dive on Election Night.’
“She said, ‘I’m going to do it either way. If Obama wins, I’ll float over the crowd. If Romney wins, don’t catch me.’
“So last night there we were, and the time came and off she went. And I thought, ‘Gosh, if my mom’s out there, I’d better go after her.’ So I went right behind her.
“This morning she woke up, and she’s been having little back problems, and she said, ‘I’ve been fixed.’
“The collective chiropractic of the Democratic crowd has solved my mother’s back problem.”