Deep South Radio

“You haven’t got any whistles in there, have you?” a security guard at the Capitol entrance asked three same-sex marriage advocates as they emptied their pockets to walk through the metal detectors.

“No, we’re very quiet,” said one, who was carrying both ChapStick and posterboard signs.

If they kept their word, they were in the minority, as Wednesday marked the eighth working day of debate on same-sex marriage — and with it, the now-familiar banshee beat of singing, chanting protestors.

It also brought pouring rain. The combination seemed to wear on all parties.

Anthony Falzarano, an anti-gay-marriage protester, was wandering the Senate gallery asking whether the vote would come, as he’d heard it rumored, “between one and two in the morning.”

Falzarano had come from West Palm Beach, Fla., to represent the ex-gay movement. He said he’d been gay for nine years in New York City, but watched his friends die of AIDS and had been straight and married with two children for 28 years.

He, like lawmakers, reporters, activists and lobbyists before him, had taken a nourishing trip to the vending machine, and was walking with a pack of honey-roasted peanuts. “It’s been three very long days,” he said, popping a peanut and wandering back into the hall outside the room where the Senate GOP members were conferencing.

A gaggle of pro-same-sex marriage supporters who work at Proctors Theater in Schenectady made the trip to Albany after leaving work, and sat in the hallway outside the Senate chamber lobby. They’d adopted signs they found abandoned on the floor that read “Equality Matters,” from the Empire State Pride Agenda.

The floor around them was covered in Pepsi bottles and candy wrappers. Hours earlier the governor’s LGBT liaison Erik Bottcher walked by munching a miniature Three Musketeers bar, given to him by the pro-marriage activists.

“There’s a difference between being physically fatigued and emotionally fatigued,” said Proctors employee Joey Hunziker, who was waiting near a pack of red-eyed state troopers.

“The fact the Senate can’t act just energizes me,” he said.

Was he ready for the Senate to vote?

“Oh, GOD, yes!” he said.

In the green-velvet benches of the Senate lobby, Dan Weiller, a spokesman for the Empire State Pride Agenda, waited on the perch he seemed to have held for most of the afternoon.

He too wanted the vote to happen. He would like a day to relax.

“I was hoping for some recovery time,” he said, “a little summer Friday action.” He hoped to make it to his partner’s cousin’s graduation, scheduled for Sunday.

The only person who didn’t seem ready to hightail it out of town was Gov. Andrew Cuomo himself, who met with reporters in the early evening to update them on his progress.

The scrum reached wall to wall. This reporter was bopped on the head by a TV camera.

“I know that you guys are anxious to get to certain votes,” Cuomo said. The reporters grumbled.

The bills, Cuomo said, were worth perfecting even if it took a while.

“I’d much rather get it right than rush it,” he said of the tax cap, just one of the many pieces of the omnibus bill the Assembly is expected to vote on tomorrow. “If it takes a few more days to get it right that’s fine by me, I’m in no rush.”

His Thursday schedule took a different position, however – the governor will be in Albany and Westchester, it said, showing the state’s chief executive to be just as ready to head home as everyone else.

(Source: nycapitolnews.com)