Members of the state Senate were rendered helpless with laughter yesterday with the premiere of a video starring newly elected Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey and Sen. Rosalind Kurita. The video, titled “Gavel in a Box,” features Ramsey, sporting a goatee and sunglasses, in various settings asking Kurita to open a box he is holding. At the climactic moment of the video, she opens the box and pulls out a gavel, which she hands to Ramsey. “It’s just great,” says one member of the Senate. “They’re sitting by a fireplace and she opens this box that has the gavel in it. It’s a big surprise when she pulls it out…. I mean, she is just full of surprises.” It was Kurita, a Democrat, who cast the deciding vote that gave Ramsey, a Republican, a victory over longtime Lt. Gov. John Wilder. Other scenes in the video show Ramsey clutching the box that presumably contains the gavel, dancing at Legislative Plaza, at Riverfront Park and at his Blountville home. “He dances pretty good for an auctioneer,” one colleague notes. “It shows him telling how to put the gavel in the box in three easy steps, and then talks about all the places and holidays when it’s good to have a gavel in a box,” another member of the Senate says. “I don’t know where they got the idea to do this video—I’ve never seen anything like it—but it should be on TV. I could even see [Ramsey] backstage at the CMAs with a gavel in a box.”
