Hillary Clinton became the target of flying footwear Thursday, just prior to delivering a speech to a recycling industry convention in Las Vegas as an unidentified woman was taken into custody after hurling a shoe at the former Secretary of State and possible next president .
But Hillary Clinton responded to the apparent shoe attack with a sense of humor, after she expertly dodged the object that sailed toward her head. She was not hit or hurt by the flying show.
Actually, the object has not been confirmed to have actually been a shoe. A security guard at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, where Hillary Clinton was delivering an address to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, quickly grabbed the object when it landed at the back of the stage and hustled it away.
“My goodness, I didn’t know that solid waste management was so controversial,” quipped Hillary Clinton, in just one of her off-the-cuff good-natured responses to the alleged show throwing incident.
“Is that somebody throwing something at me? Is that part of Cirque de Soleil?” she said.
Clinton was one of several speakers at the convention, for the group that encompasses about 1,700 waste management firms that recycle such materials as metals, paper, plastics, glass, rubber, electronics and textiles.
Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak was also on the bill, but by all reports made his appearance without needing to evade missiles launched from the audience.
According to a witness, the woman marched down the aisle and stopped about six rows from the front of the auditorium. She then hurled the shoe, or whatever it was, at Hillary Clinton on the stage.
One witness described the object as “something orange thrown from the side aisle with papers that fluttered in the air.”
The woman gave herself up to the hotel security staff and reportedly told them the object was a shoe. The hotel said it would turn the woman over to Las Vegas police to be arrested.
A piece of paper apparently thrown by the woman at Hillary Clinton was recovered after the speech. An Associated Press reporter described the paper as, “a copy of a Department of Defense document labeled confidential and dated August 1967; it referred to an operation ‘Cynthia’ in Bolivia.”
Operation Cynthia was a 1967 effort involving 2,500 Bolivian troops to capture revolutionary leader Che Guevara.
What “Operation Cynthia” has to do with Hillary Clinton, who was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Wellesley College when it took place, was not made clear.