A lone figure stood holding a blue HARRIS WALZ 2024 sign amidst an incoming sea of Trump supporters as the doors opened for the MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden at 2 pm Sunday.
“New Yorker, American woman,” Shannon Curry-Hartmann said of herself.
Hundreds of people in red MAGA hats, Trump hats and scarves trooped past. Some who saw her sign began chanting. “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Curry-Hartmann let out a cry of steadfast positivity.
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“Woooooo!”
She assured the Daily Beast that she was not frightened.
“I’ve been scared before,” she said. “This is not scary. These people are not scary.”
Only after a reporter cited 9/11 as a truly scary moment in New York did Curry-Hartmann reveal that her first husband had been a passenger aboard American Airline Flight 11, which flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at the start of the attack.
His name was Andrew Curry-Green. He was a former Eagle Scout who had been flying from Boston to their home in Los Angeles on a business trip with the hope of preventing lay-offs at his company. She was–and is–a working artist. They were the same age.
“We were 34,” she said.
She was now 57 and she has since married a wonderful public school teacher named Brian Curry-Hartmann. She says their daughter Hazel is the very best thing that ever happened to her.
“I’m very lucky in some ways,” Shannon Curry-Hartmann said. “In a lot of ways.”
But none of the Trumpers who trooped past could have known any of that. She was not there as a 9/11 widow.
She was simply someone expressing what she has come to believe after careful consideration: that Kamala Harris is the candidate who best represents her beliefs.
It is not the first time she has expressed her convictions. In 2017, she was one of 200,000 at the Women’s March on Washington, and she has participated in occasional protests.
But she had never done anything like standing as a solo sentinel outside Sunday’s rally.
“I just felt like I wanted to go and show a sign,” she said.
She opened her tan jacket to show she was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with 1973, the year of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.
A teen in tan shorts, a white shirt and an American flag necktie stopped on seeing her sign.
“Wait!” he inquired. “You support Harris?”
“Yes, I do,” Curry-Hartmann replied. “And I support freedom of speech. And I think it’s great that you guys are here and you can have a rally wherever [Trump] wants. It’s America.”
The teen seemed momentarily unsure how to respond.
Finally, he said something. “Good luck.”
