ZOMG, I just shook hands and got my first autograph with a head of state!
President Ilves spoke at the very beginning of a thank you concert on Sunday evening, the final day of the Teeme Ära! 2008 weekend. After speaking to the assembled crowd of a few hundred in the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds, he hopped off stage and walked toward some of the standing crowd. He had one uniformed high-ranking member of the Estonian military with him, his wife, and maybe four or five bodyguards with earpieces.
Veljo, some of the Teeme Ära crew (including Rainer Nolvak and company) and I were sitting near the front row. As soon as I spotted President Ilves starting to mingle with the crowd, I hopped up from my seat and walked over to him, microphone in hand. His back was turned to me at first, but I made sure that the bodyguard saw me and knew I wasn’t threatening.
When his body turned toward me, I made a “one minute” gesture with my index finger and started blabbering away in English — THI went to high school, ugrad and graduate school in the US and used to be the Ambassador to the United States. I mentioned that I was an American radio reporter and that I knew his son, who is an undergraduate at Stanford University. That definitely got his attention.
So then he looked at me and said: “So you want an interview?”, to which I responded, “Yes, if you have two minutes.”
We talked about the cleanup day, and he compared it to his first days in the late 1960s in the US when being ecologically-conscious was just starting to hit Americans. As he spoke, I wished that the band on stage would have stopped playing — didn’t they know that I was interviewing the President? (Plus, every radio reporter hates doing interviews when there’s music playing in the background.)
And yes, I was gauche enough to ask for an autograph, but I had left my camera at my seat, and when I went back for it, a small crowd had gathered, taking photos and asking for autographs. I snapped a few shots, but didn’t get one with me and him together.
Still, pretty effin’ sweet, eh?
