Early Saturday morning Dermot Givens will load suitcases -- and his 8-year-old son, Damian -- into a rented van and begin his journey to the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
The Los Angeles attorney is going even though he doesn't have a ticket to any of next week's events. He doesn't plan to volunteer. He's not a delegate, doesn't hold political office and is not on anyone's VIP list.
But Dermot and Damian Givens expect to arrive in Denver in plenty of time to somehow watch Barack Obama step up to the podium Thursday and accept his party's nomination for president in front of 75,000 people at Invesco Field, home to the Denver Broncos.
They will be joined by hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of others who have no tickets but are drawn to the Mile-High City to be part of current events.
For Givens it will be an opportunity to hear Obama on the anniversary of another storied event: the 45th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington. Givens' memory of that event is the car ride he took with his parents, who were driving from Detroit to the march.
"They dropped me off at my aunt's house in Pittsburgh," he recalled. "I grew up a kid of the civil rights movements, and I could have said 'I went to the March on Washington.' But I didn't. They dropped me off in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh!"
The ranks of those who plan to just show up in Denver include a New York City lobbyist for social programs who said she had been energized by the Obama campaign to fight even harder for the poor; the head of an economic development program in South Los Angeles who said the campaign had rekindled emotions she hadn't felt since the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 run for the presidency; and a Jackson, Miss., lawyer who wasn't an Obama supporter but now finds herself drawn to the candidate and to Denver.
They will all have to work hard to achieve their dream.
The convention is expected to draw at least 50,000 people (5,000 delegates, 15,000 members of the media and 30,000 others) from out of state, and most of the area's 42,000 hotel rooms are booked. In addition, a lion's share of the tickets to Obama's speech Thursday have been distributed to residents of such battleground states as Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming and New Mexico.
