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I Was a Preteen Intern During the Clinton Impeachment
In 1998 I was 12 years old. Every news channel and radio station chattered repetitively about Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, the Oval Office, cigars and blue dresses. My mom, my younger siblings and I were crashing at my aunt and uncle’s house outside Sacramento, California after two tumultuous years of homelessness. We had run away from my dad after he threatened to kill us, so we lived in hiding all over the west coast as my parents’ divorce dragged on. I was grateful to live indoors again with a bathroom, washer, dryer and kitchen, but my aunt and uncle’s guest room was so small that my siblings and I slept in a walk-in closet. This would become the inevitable punchline to a joke years later when I came out of the metaphorical closet.
Before I was old enough to vote, I loved politics. I loved anything that made sense out of the world’s chaos. And as a budding theater nerd, to me, a politician was just someone who was very good at monologues. I loved reading laws and learning how they were historically interpreted. I voraciously read about the Holocaust, studying it so that I could be confident I would know exactly what to do if it ever happened again. My teachers and aunt told my mother that they were concerned I was reading books that were too graphically violent. I read about slavery, the Nazis, and ancient Egypt because I couldn’t understand why…
