Left holding the (brown) bag

It’s not often you get to have lunch with a U.S. Senator. Yet that’s exactly what I did yesterday. Actually, I should rephrase that: I got to watch a U.S. Senator have lunch yesterday. You see, at the end of his first year in the Senate, Ben Cardin (right) invited a small group of reporters for a “brown bag lunch” in his Washington office. As a political junkie, it was a pretty cool assignment, and as a reporter, it was nice to have the undivided attention of sitting U.S. Senator for an hour and a half. Let me tell you, that is a hell of a lot of access. But I didn’t know what the protocol for a brown bag lunch at a Senator’s office was. Did I bring my own food or did they provide it? I ended up sticking a sandwich and chips in my briefcase. I figured if I needed to bring the food, I’d just pull it out of my bag, and if they provided it, I had lunch for the next day. Well neither happened.