05/29/09 Looking forward to this:

Always great swag (usually photo gear with the White House Photographer’s logo stamped on it) and it must be one of the most raucous black tie events in DC every year.  The Correspondent’s Dinner is much more placid, for example. The audience is so loud that no one can hear the speeches. Watch it on C-SPAN.  I just tried without success to find on YouTube the video of Joe Scarborough hosting the event a few years back. Hilarious. He gets more and more angry at how noisy the crowd is as the evening wears on. At the finish of the program,  he said something like “Good Riddance!” or “I’m never doing this again!” I can’t quite remember what he said because I was loudly talking to people at my table.

The other very funny thing about the evening is the slideshow that plays during dinner with the award winning images. Without fail, every table of photographers will have one or two or ten people say “I shot that same exact image” or “I have a better version of that photo.” Hah!