In the kitchen, everyone was working at full
capacity. There was not a single person standing by, doing nothing. Every
single worker was doing something, even if they were just apprentices or the
chef himself. All hands were needed for the banquet to go exactly as planned
and one of the most important parts of the whole experience was, of course, the
food. It wasn’t possible to do a proper banquet without a great menu and the
one for that event had been checked at least a hundred times and by a diverse group
of people, all with different tastes.
Of course, the most important person in the
whole gala was the president, as he had been the one to organize the event. It
wasn’t one of those planned things that took place every single year but an
impromptu kind of thing that had arisen from the fact that the president wanted
to do a benefit for a cause he thought had not been helped enough in recent
years. Public opinion was really divided on the subject but most people admired
what he had done and how he had done it. After all, it was very uncommon for a
president to stop his work to do something else.
Some papers were criticizing every single
aspect of the event, from the price of the food and the flower arrangements, to
the list of guests. Some said it was too big and others too small. Some said he
had invited people from the wrong countries and organizations and others
praised him exactly for that. It wasn’t new that the press was not in agreement
completely; they had always been very divided on the presidency from day one,
which had taken place a little more than a year ago, after a very uncommon
period of transition.
Awkward was the better word because the new
president had asked the old one to give him an office in the presidential
headquarters, as he wanted to check on everything as it happened. Such a thing
had never been attempted and a certain distance was thought to be the wisest
thing when dealing with such a moment. But from the first moment of him been
the president elect of the country, it was very clear he wasn’t going to be
like any other president, in the country’s past or in other countries. He was,
for lack of a better word, uncommon.
Very uncommon indeed as he had won in the most
unexpected way, when many people had decided it was the best to make a change
at the very last minute. Polls had never granted him the presidency and he
thought, the morning of the election itself, that he was going to lose for sure
but he wanted to go away gracefully so he did something unexpected: he shared the
day with people around his city, visiting tourist spots and taking random
pictures. Apparently people loved that because in the afternoon, polling
stations were filled with voters.
By the end of the night, he had been declared
the winner with over five percent of the vote over the other candidate; a woman
everyone had predicted would be the next president. She was the very opposite
of him, someone who seemed to have fire in her eyes, always talking with an
amount of passion that seemed to much for such a small woman. Millions adored
her and, of course, by the big conglomerates that actually controlled the
country. She loved to speak about economics and foreign affairs and all such
things.
However, the new president had never really
been passionate for anything. To be perfectly honest, he had been chosen out of
nowhere by the third most important party in the country. It was predicted that
the two most voted parties in the last election would hold the same spots in
the new election but that didn’t happen. People were tired of the game between
those two parties that, at the end of the day, were exactly the same party if
you were to compare their policies on several key elements of people’s lives.
They just had slight differences.
Studies on those elections would last for
years, as never had predicted that surge of a third option. And now that third
option was organizing an impromptu dinner in honor of a cause many thought
wasn’t “attractive” enough. In this day and age, people still thought some
subjects were best not spoken out loud, in the open, much less in a fancy
dinner table with expensive Champaign and a band playing music from eighty
years ago. The president was known by now for his odd choices and that was also
reflected on his choice of food.
The people in the kitchen had elaborated a
menu that mixed very high cuisine with foods that everyone loved. The dishes
were particularly successful among the special guests of the evening. In other
words, the people that were directly affected by the charity they were raising
money form. After all, they were all normal people that did not really have
experience in fancy dinners and strange food, so the combination of high
cuisine experiments with almost fast food, was a success among them and many
presidential supporters.
Of course, the richest people in the event
weren’t very thrilled to be eating what were basically hamburgers, hot dogs and
fried chicken, in a very old hall that had a long history of elegant banquets
to celebrate the riches of the rich, instead of charitable efforts. However,
the rich were never shy when it came to donating, as it was the perfect way to
pay fewer taxes and to be seen as some kind of savior by the people that were
benefitted by that money they didn’t need.
It was incredible to see how the people, the
same that had voted for the president, supported him again on that decision and
thought the choices overall were just excellent. Some thought they were funny
enough but everyone agreed that it was the necessary shake up that needed to
happen in such a stiff political environment. Everyone took things too
seriously sometimes and it was nice to see that the president had a sense of
humor or at least the capacity to be different. People admired him for that,
long before he was a president.
It was never really clear if he did those
things on purpose or if everything was kind of a “happy accident”. Whatever it
was, it always seemed to work. It was the same thing when he worked for a large
software conglomerate where most of the workers were younger than him and he
wasn’t even that old. At first they mistrusted him because they didn’t thought
it was possible he would even know about what they did in the company, but
after a while he showed everyone how interested and invested he was on the
company, surprising them in many ways.
Of course, he was always nervous. He had even
joked that he would love to have a first lady by his side to have someone to
hold hands with in the most tense and difficult moments. He even joked he would
settle for a first gentleman and some of the journalists laughed out loud that day.
He was something very unexpected and was attacked because he wasn’t the same
kind of politician everyone had seen once and again for the last hundred years.
But that’s exactly why so many people supported him; he was very different from
them all.
Some of his supporters had even organized
meetings to help him with some subjects and to get him to talk about things
that people felt were important in that moment. And he was gracious enough to
hear them, after the meetings he had to attend about the economy or foreign
trade or who knows what. He always had time for everyone and he seemed to be happier
when talking and sharing with actual people. That’s why some said he was the
best president in the world and others said he was a disaster waiting to
happen.
After the gala, he sent the millions won for
the charity to the proper people and many were able to find some kind of solace
in the fact that he had remembered them as victims. Rumors of a second term
were already in the air. But when asked about it, he always laughed loudly and
said he would rather end the one he was in first to see if he was successful enough
to deserve more time. Of course, three years later, he won by a landslide,
another unexpected win.
