At occasions, it had the texture of an enviornment live performance, Bigwig’s cocktail hour, nightclub and amusement park. backside.
Governor Maura Healy is the primary girl elected governor of Massachusetts and the nation’s first overtly lesbian governor. Earlier than her inauguration at her enviornment, she and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll have been inaugurated earlier within the day because the state’s first all-female government duo.
And, as a video broadcast from The Backyard’s Jumbotron famous, Healy was additionally the primary Governor of Bay to play skilled basketball, and was some extent guard for an Austrian group after graduating from regulation college.
Basketball motifs run wild into the evening with an arcade-style mini-hoop the place revelers can shoot baskets and foam fingers emblazoned with the slogan “Let’s Workforce Massachusetts” beneath the theme of “Transferring the Ball Ahead” I used to be. Healy and Driscoll confirmed off their matching high-top sneakers with basketballs as they took the stage.
All got here collectively for what Driscoll known as “a special form of backyard social gathering.”
“We needed this place as a result of it is a particular place,” says Driscoll. “Lookup on the ceiling. These championship banners. They would not be with out teamwork, and Maura and I are about teamwork.”
Healy’s formal swearing-in ceremony on the State Capitol was a extra solemn affair steeped in custom. Night celebrations have grow to be livelier and extra trendy. As an alternative of high hats and ceremonial workers, there have been rainbow mild sticks, balloon arches, and a photograph with Blaze, the Boston Bruins mascot. However the sense of historical past was nonetheless up within the air.
“I cried watching the inauguration. I’m such a political battleaxe that you’d suppose I used to be impervious to it,” stated Arline Isaacson, co-chair of the Massachusetts GLBTQ Political Caucus. Talking from the sector concourse.
The occasion kicked off with performances by Massachusetts acts together with Salem Excessive’s a cappella group Witch Pitch, Everett Excessive Faculty’s Marching Band, Roxbury hip-hop artists OOMPA, and the Boston Homosexual Males’s Refrain.
Ellis Patterson, Founder and Government Inventive Director of Skills Dance Boston, offered the dance with audio commentary explaining the strikes for the visually impaired viewers.
“It has been nice to see the incoming Girls’s Management Workforce take severely the alternative ways they intersect with illustration, and I am comfortable to see incapacity included in that,” she advised GBH Information.
Boston Celtics nice Bob Cousy, former WNBA participant and Olympian Sue Chicken, and former U.S. ladies’s soccer group co-captain Megan Rapinoe all wished Healy effectively in a video message, and tennis champion Billy Gene King describes her as “a frontrunner with a want to win.” ”
It was headlined by singer-songwriter Brandi Carlyle, who was launched as Healy’s favourite performer. He stated he was. They have been made to really feel much less.
Carlyle welcomed his spouse Katherine on stage together with her and advised the gang that the 2 have been married in Massachusetts when the federal Protection of Marriage Act was nonetheless in impact. Whereas working within the workplace of the
“We owe a whole lot of that freedom and privilege to Governor Healy, who was on the slicing fringe of DOMA repeal lengthy earlier than DOMA was cool,” Carlile stated.
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