Editor’s Note: President and Chief Executive of DC Productions ltd, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld served as Press Secretary to First Lady Betty Ford.  Her White House memoir, First Lady’s Lady, was a selection of the Literary Guild and Reader’s Digest Book Clubs. She created, produced and hosted numerous television programs and documentaries and  is the recipient of an Emmy and the Silver Screen Award.  The Republic of San Marino knighted her, bestowing upon her the Order of Saint Agatha. She is a graduate of Brandeis University and a member of the Cosmos Club and the Consular Corps of Washington DC.
 
Sheila’s married to Edward Weidenfeld and has two grown sons.

My family’s feeling very popular this week. We’re hearing from lots of people who want to visit us — not just family and friends, but their friends and families — during the Inaugural week. Oh, yes, and a dozen chefs who are coming to prepare pre-inaugural $1000-a-couple Alice Waters dinners at private homes (at my neighbors’, Elsa Walsh and Bob Woodward, for example, and at my close friends’ Cathy Sulzberger and Joe Perpich) for charity. All they’re asking for is beds and a place to stash their stuff.

It would be nice to accommodate everyone, but our few guest beds are booked. I’ve checked every hotel in town, and there’s not an available room at any price in or around DC. Bridges connecting Virginia to Washington (including Key Bridge to Georgetown, where I live) will be closed, as will major roadways from Maryland. Many DC blocks will be cordoned off. It’s foot, bicycle or subway, and the subway will be jammed.

Ed and I plan to avoid the mob. No Inaugural balls for us, so I don’t have to worry about wearing the correct thing, which in this case is an old frock, costume jewelry and comfortable shoes. We’ll watch the swearing-in and parade on TV at the Metropolitan Club, where we’ve been going since 1977, when the White House gates closed behind me at the end my tenure as Betty Ford’s press secretary.

The club’s right around the corner from the White House, so we’ll be hiking from home. My Inaugural Day attire will be three sweaters, a heavy coat or an old raincoat (the Secret Service won’t allow anyone to carry an umbrella), earmuffs, a long woolen scarf and Aerosole boots. But hey, the club has bathrooms, which puts me way ahead of the 240,000 people with Inaugural tickets, who will share 5,000 toilets with the non-ticket holders and have been told to bring their own toilet paper.

We did go to Sen. Susan Collins’s swearing-in reception for Congress at the Dirksen Senate Building last Tuesday, but otherwise we’re only going to places where you don’t have to strip for security. So that leaves dinner parties like the one honoring Gen. Jim Jones and his wife Diane at the home of Michael and Karen Ansari, Margot Pritzker’s dinner at Le Paradou for The Aspen Institute, with Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Robert Steel, William Mayer and Walter Isaacson, and the dinner at Marcels given by ExecutiveAction’s Neil Livingstone and Cynthia Tsai, fourth wife of Gerald Tsai, through whom I met Larry Summers. We’ll go to hear Kissinger deliver the Atlantic Council’s Christopher Makins lecture, and the reception given by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the British Ambassador. I was going to go to the full day conference the U.S. Institute of Peace is having on "Passing on the Baton," with speakers including Condoleezza Rice, Gen. David Petraeus, Admiral Michael Mullen, William Cohen, Madeleine Albright, William Perry, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stephen Hadley and Robert Zoellick, but the furnace man had promised to come fix the heating system.

Welcome to Washington. We’re sorry we we can’t put you up. We look forward to seeing you … but at places where we don’t have to be frisked.