Psst: The Obama inauguration is still big and flashy

The inaugural team made a show of announcing that the festivities to mark Obama’s second Inauguration would be greatly curtailed this year as a nod to tough economic times. Rather than the 10 official balls that the president and first lady zipped around to in 2009, this year there would be only two: the Commander-in-Chief’s Ball, for 4,000 servicemen and -women and families of deployed soldiers, and then another for everyone else.

Left unsaid, however, was that the two balls together would host tens of thousands of people and feature a stout array of high-profile entertainers performing over two floors of the vast convention center. Among them: Stevie Wonder, Usher, Katy Perry, Marc Anthony, John Legend, Smokey Robinson and Alicia Keyes. “So it’s not a 10 [balls] down to two type situation,” concedes Kerrigan.

There are indeed fewer official social events planned for the hundreds of thousands of partygoers set to celebrate Obama’s swearing-in, but what there are have been underplayed. You won’t find listed on any official calendars, for example, an A-list candlelight dinner Sunday night at the Kennedy Center for high rollers and other Democratic hotshots that the president and first lady Michelle Obama are set to attend.