Last-minute plea scores Obama tickets for woman, buddy, strangers

By Alan Gathright, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 28, 2008 at 8:31 p.m.
Updated August 28, 2008 at 8:31 p.m.

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INVESCO FIELD — Linden Mundekis had given up on getting a ticket to Barack Obama’s big speech Wednesday afternoon.

“I was saying: ‘This is impossible,” recalled Mundekis, 41, digital marketing director for Tokyo Joe’s eatery in Denver.

Then, while watching a replay of Michelle Obama’s DNC speech on the Web, she decided to e-mail every Colorado Democratic leader she could think of – Gov. Bill Ritter, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and Rep. Diana DeGette.

“I’m really disappointed right now,” she e-mailed them about 2 p.m. Wednesday. “I feel (an Invesco ticket) is so out of reach for the common person.”

Democrats had kept saying, “The convention doors, we’re throwing them wide open,” she recalled. “I said, ‘They’re not open. They’re closed and locked.’ ”

Two hours later, she got a call from a Democrat National Convention official, saying: “Your e-mail has been forwarded to us. We are very sorry that you’ve gone through this. We’d love for you to come to the event.”

Soon she had four tickets for the Obama speech in her hand.

Mundekis admitted she was briefly tempted to cash in on the tickets that were being hawked for up to $4,000 on the Internet.

She called her friend, Nicolette Vajtay, with her “moral dilemma.”

“I was her good conscience,” Vajtay said.

So, Mundekis said, “I went online Wednesday night looking for someone who cared as much about the convention as I did and who was going through the same thing.”

On craigslist.com, she found Jenna Baker, 19, a “starving student” at the University of Northern Colorado. She also came across Trena Green, 36, an African-American woman in Aurora who wrote that “it would be a blessing” to hear Obama speak on the 45th Anniversary of Marthin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech.

Mundekis called the strangers at 11 p.m. and was able to register their ticket information online just before the midnight deadline.

On Thursday afternoon, Mundekis and Vajtay and their two new friends were shouting, “Woo-Hoo!” about their good fortune in the sunshine of Invesco Field.

“Obama is bringing people together and he doesn’t even know it,” Vajtay declared.

“What I thought was the most beautiful part is that the average person reached out and got a response,” Mundekis said. “At the same time yesterday, I didn’t have a ticket.”

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