At least, that's the figure that seems to be winning the estimating game so far. The number comes from Mayor Adrian Fenty's people.

This marks the first time any DC mayor has taken the lead in announcing an inaugural crowd estimate.

The National Park Service used to handle those chores, until Louis Farrakhan made a stink about the agency's estimation of 400,000 for 1995's Million Man March, also on the Mall.

It looked like the Park Service was going to jump back into the number crunching business when earlier this week an NPS spokesperson told the media to expect an official inaugural estimate on Thursday.

But yesterday, the agency cited the Farrakhan-inspired Congressional ban on crowd estimation and declined to throw out a figure.

Go with somebody else's number, NPS officials told inquirers.

So, 1.8 million it is.

For now.

A friend offered me tickets on Saturday.

I told him I don't own a tux — ostensibly, it's a black tie affair — and it was too late to rent one.

But my friend said that, given the state of the economy, tuxes aren't the only acceptable garb this time around. Plain ol' dark suits will abound and won't be sneered at.

I don't own a suit, dark or otherwise. (Well, I still own my wedding suit, but the scales tell me I'm half the man I was when I got married — plus the man I was when I got married. So it's just a keepsake.)

Actually, heading into the weekend I didn't have a dress jacket or even a clean pair of long pants that fit me.

But I figured I'd give my nearest thrift shop a shot. I was there for 20 minutes and walked out with a black wool suit, black shoes and a fab Lou Rawls live LP.

Total cost: $20.54

Looks like I'm going to an inaugural ball tonight.

Brotman is a DC legend. Along with his work with presidents, he's a fixture on the local sporting scene. He announced Senators games at Griffith Stadium. He handled PR for Ray Leonard when Sugar Ray was among the most famous athletes in the world. And for decades he took care of publicity for nearly every major golf or tennis event that DC hosted.

And everything Brotman does, he does with a smile.

Now back to me: In 1980, I went to the pro tennis tournament at Carter Barron with some fellow teenage drunks. We intended to heckle the top seed, Jimmy Connors.

And with the courage provided by the extra large beers sold at the event — no fooling, beer buyers were offered "regular," "large" and "tub," and we only went for the latter — we heckled and heckled and heckled the guy who had been the world's top-ranked player for most of the previous decade.

"Where's the centerfold, Jimmy!" was our go-to line for Connors, who had only recently married former Playboy playmate Patti Connors.

Connors wasn't offended by our taunts. Instead, he walked over during his match and told us we were going to be his guests for the rest of the tournament. He took us to the post-match press conference and instructed the guy running the conference, Charlie Brotman, to hand out all-access player passes to all four of his wannabe tormentors.

Brotman was appalled by the request, but Connors got what he wanted when in DC. We got the passes.

We showed up two days later for Connors' next match. He played horribly. We acted worse.

Because of the passes, we didn't bother buying tubs of beer. There were buckets of iced bottles in the players' tent, where we hung out even while Connors was losing. Our day ended early when Brotman came over and wagged his finger at us and said: "I've gotten complaints from EVERY SECTOR OF THE STADIUM about you!"

Connors was out of the draw. We were no longer welcome at Brotman's tournament.

Years later, I got to know Brotman through covering events he ran, including the tennis tournament. Turns out he's as nice and happy a guy as you could meet. He probably hasn't yelled at anybody since those four drunk kids played the fools at Carter Barron.

I wrote a story about Brotman sometime in the 1990s, and, even without any tubs of beer in my system, worked up enough courage to apologize for my behavior at his tournament all those years ago.

He told me not to worry about it. What a guy.

Barack Obama wore a red tie.

Symbolic show of acceptance and reaching across the aisle?

Coincidence?

Did they call each other?

Am I late to this party?

The previous record was held by Lyndon Johnson's 1965 swearing-in.

"But this isn't official, of course," said ABC anchor Charles Gibson announced.

Wait a minute! The record's not official? How come?

Oh, right.

Getting shut out from actually seeing the swearing-in had its privileges. Well, privilege: I had retail row of inauguration swag on F Street NW pretty much to myself.

I got caught up in the moment. Hell, for today at least, I'm ready to believe the guy deserves an action figure.

Only a superhero could attract so many people to one place at one time.

I paid $15 for the doll.

This is the scene on E Street NW about an hour ago. Most entrances toward the Mall were already closed off, with police telling folks different stories about what would be open and what wouldn't.

Nobody in this photo, save maybe some law enforcement types, would make it down there by the time Barack Obama gets sworn in.

Congress kicked Street and his agency out of the estimating business for DC events after the controversy over the size of the Million Man March in 1995. Street said 400,000 showed up; organizer Louis Farrakhan wanted the government to declare a crowd in the seven-figures, to match the title of his gathering.

So, there's no official arbiter anymore.

And news accounts of yesterday's concert on the mall show how mussed up historical records will be until the Park Service gets back at it.

CBS says "a crowd of tens of thousands" showed up to see Springsteen.

Radio Free Europe told its audience "some 75,000" were there for Aretha Franklin.

The Irish Times wrote that "a crowd of hundreds of thousands" showed up to see Bono.

Richard Nixon's hometown paper, the Whitter Daily News went with "more than 300,000."

The Sudbury Star of Canada divulged that the president-elect "enthralled a crowd of 500,000."

Britain's Daily Mail was less conservative, reporting that when Obama spoke at the concert, he was "facing more than half a million people."

Far as I can tell, as diverse as these numbers are, nobody guesstimated that a million folks showed up.

Farrakhan must be pleased.

Because of security and traffic concerns, most of the news teams' staffers won't be leaving their offices until their inaugural duties are done.

For many folks, that means they won't go home until Wednesday.

One problem with this arrangement.

"There are two showers in the whole building," a C-SPAN producer tells me.

Turns out the only full-service restroom is located in a tiny health club on the ground floor of the media center.

I ask the C-SPAN producer if he plans to spend any time over the next two days standing in line behind Greta Van Susteren and other media types to use one of the spickets.

"Nope," he says.

Van Susteren always looks she just got a whiff of something awful, anyway. Now she'll have an excuse for the grimace: The whole compound could reek like a Port Authority bathroom in no time.

As if the funk wasn't going to be enough with the building just full of its regular tenants, CBS crews from out of town are squatting on the third floor.

As another famous person with a "Van" prefixed surname, the great Ronnie Van Zant, once wrote: "Ewwww! That smell! Can't you smell that smell?"

Yeah. Smells like cable news.

"My band played an inaugural ball!" says Michael Dolan. "Being a Washingtonian, it doesn't get any better than that."

Dolan (Gonzaga College High School Class of '68) is a writer of books and TV scripts, and, nearest and dearest to me, a former Washington City Paper writer.

He, in fact, wrote the most famous or infamous story City Paper has ever published, a 1987 muckrake that revealed the video rental habits of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Federal privacy laws were actually changed because of Dolan's piece.

Dolan moved on from City Paper to other writing gigs a long time ago. And rather recently, he took up playing the bass when his kid went off to college and he found he had some free time. He and some friends get together to pluck various combinations of G/C/D as the house band at a farmer's market in Palisades.

As can happen, Dolan caught the playing out bug. So as an offshoot of his street-performance combo, Dolan formed a large indoor, R&B flavored combo named WMD.

Dolan's the "D." The "M" is his pal, Ian Martinez, who when not picking strings served as a staffer for the Obama campaign.

"He always said, 'If Obama wins, we're playing the inaugural!'" Dolan says.

And over the weekend, so they did: Dolan and his fellow part-time giggers made the leap from MacArthur Blvd. to a more presidential stage, as an expanded version of WMD played the People's Inaugural Ball at the Carnegie Library.

"The place was packed and everybody was nice and seemed to enjoy us," he says. "The stage had two levels, and we had a brass section and some guys standing behind us and above us, so I felt like I was on 'Shindig.' I'm thinking the whole time, 'I'm playing an inauguration!' What a thrill!"

Congrats, Mike.

JVs is a link to the old Old Dominion, however.

Judging from the scene inside JV's, a wondrous Falls Church honky tonk that's only a few blocks from my boyhood home, you'd think the state was still redder than Six Flags' financials. Another American flag or MIA placard hangs every few feet overhead. It's no accident that bikers use the place as their Ground Zero during Rolling Thunder weekend.

If there's a bar inside the Beltway with a more overtly conservative clientele, I haven't been there.

I went to JV's in 2003 to watch George W. Bush's speech to the nation the night he started bombing Iraq. I figured it would give me insight into how the rest of the country felt, since everybody I knew downtown was against the invasion.

The bar was packed that night, and I remember seeing a guy from the neighborhood who'd I'd known for years raising his beer and yelling "Let's kick some fucking ass!" when Bush finished talking. Everybody cheered.

So I went back to JV's again tonight. I wanted to see how a bar whose regulars leaned as far to the right as any three-legged dog would do on a night when the mood around town was all about entertaining The Other Side.

The answer: Not real well.

The musical lineup JV's management put out there was as old school as the bar itself: Tom Principato, Catfish Hodge, Tommy Lepson, Pete Ragusa and Steve Wolf were playing together as the January All-Stars. About 30 years ago, all the Stars were in separate DC bands that each got radio airplay and would have packed any Georgetown nightspot on the night before a holiday — Principato in Powerhouse, Wolf with Danny Gatton's Redneck Jazz, Lepson in the Lazy Boys and Root Boy Slim, Ragusa in the Nighthawks, and Hodge fronting his own group.

But on this night, at its most crowded, I counted 16 paying customers in the whole place.

Sixteen! That's about 20 percent as big as the bunch there whooping and hollering on the night of Bush's speech.

"I don't know why nobody's here," said Lepson.

Me neither.

But maybe the guy taking money at the door dressed in an official JV's t-shirt with the slogan "Don't Blame Me I Voted for McCain" on the back provided a clue.

In any case, the show was fabulous. I still say that when it comes to hearing the blues or watching a declaration of war, JV's is the place to be.

That's as great an American tune as has ever been written. As the world sees it, Springsteen is his generation's greatest American songwriter.

The setting was totally American.

Except for that dang Takamine guitar Bruce was strumming.

Takamine's a Japanese product that Spingsteen has long endorsed.

This country's in some trouble on the manufacturing front. We don't make anything anymore that the rest of the world wants except cluster bombs and guitars.

When it comes to guitars, in fact, we still rule. In the last 60 years, there hasn't been a picker on the planet that hasn't coveted our Gibsons, Fenders and Martins.

Woody Guthrie, the guy who wrote "This Land Is Your Land," was known for painting his rockin' slogan, "This machine kills fascists!," on Martin guitars.

Come back, Bruce. Your country needs you.

In the wake of members of every other media organization on the planet, I went by Ben's Chili Bowl this afternoon.*

THIS JUST IN: There's still a crowd in and outside the place!

The line should get manageable again sometime around 2017...

*Cliche as this drive-by was, the trip left me totally jazzed. The elation outside Ben's is catchy! Go there!

Photo courtesy of Me

Friends, as we observe the inauguration of a new president, there are still two Americas: Those that are happy to see Barack Obama take office, and those that aren't.

Yesterday, during a visit to Gambrills, Md., our car was vandalized by a member of the latter demographic.

Somebody with a lot of free time, duct tape and leftover paraphrenalia from the 2008 presidential campaign taped a "NOBAMA 'O8" placard over the rear license plate of our car, which was parked in front of my in-laws' house.

The offending paperwork also advertised for www.malagent.com, a blowhardy but currently inactive blog written by an apparent far right-winger. (There have been no posts on that site since Nov. 6.)

The car had no bumper or window stickers betraying any political affiliation. Just an American flag decal that was stuck on the back windshield before we bought it. We figured we were tagged because of our DC tags.

But then the vandals came back later and taped more of the same on the door of my brother-in-law's house, while a number of folks stood feet away on the other side of that door.

My brother in law is a loyal Republican. He's peeved.

But, as low-brow and time-consuming as the act was, it doesn't appear to be a prank: Other houses in the neighborhood were also struck yesterday.

I'm generally pro-civil disobedience, but what bugs me most about these actions is: Did the genius have to use duct tape on all four sides?