U.S. Rep. David Price will help lead a hearing Wednesday on how thousands of visitors were kept out of the presidential inauguration ceremony in January despite holding tickets.

On the late morning of Jan. 20, people were caught outside ticketed areas as Barack Obama took the stage to be sworn in. Many were corralled inside the underground Third Street tunnel, crammed together with few police officers around, in what became known as the Purple Tunnel of Doom, named after the ticket colors. Many were stuck inside the tunnel for several hours without moving.

The chaos marred an otherwise calm day, and congressional offices were flooded with complaints, reports Barb Barrett.

A congressional report released last week found that crowds showed up at the Capitol before police did, that screening lines became ineffective in part because of non-ticketed guests, that there was confusion among law enforcement about the crowds and that more people than expected showed up to watch the ceremony from areas close to the Capitol.

More after the jump.

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It wasn't the Oscars, but it was a close second.

Gov. Beverly Perdue hobnobbed with other governors in the State Dining Room of the White House Sunday. Instead of Sean Penn and Kate Winslet, they heard from President Obama and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

Perdue, who skipped the president's inauguration to focus on work, said it was "a real privilege" to represent North Carolina.

"I don't have a bar to compare it to," she said. "It was very inviting — very beautiful, wonderful food, wonderful music, and the president spoke so eloquently. Everybody was dolled up, so it was a real special night."

Perdue sat with Govs. Dave Freudenthal of Wyoming, Brad Henry of Oklahoma and Jon Huntsman of Utah under a seating arrangement designed to bridge partisan and geographic boundaries.

She also met with other female Democratic governors, including potential Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Okay, so you made it to inauguration and got a sweet seat up front.

You can find yourself in this 1,474 megapixel, high-res photo taken by photographer David Bergman.

You can click and zoom in endlessly around the photo. Find the Supreme Court justices, the former presidents, Denzel Washington in a blue cap.

We found U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield on the risers behind the president, and one of your faithful Dome correspondents a few rows below the podium.

The photographer tells how he did it here.

Spot any other North Carolina notables in the crowd? Tell us in the comments below.

The inauguration of President Barack Obama on Tuesday drew a bigger television audience in Raleigh-Durham than in any other major TV market in the nation, according to the Nielsen Co.

In the Raleigh-Durham market, more than 51 percent of households tuned in for the day's events, Nielsen said today. Seattle-Tacoma had the lowest viewership, with only 18.8 percent of households watching the events.

The overall rating in the top 56 local TV markets was 29.2 percent.

Many people in the Raleigh-Durham area were home on Tuesday because of a winter snowfall, which closed schools and many offices.

Two capital reporters say the snow has been good for the governor.

In his "This Old State" blog, Charlotte Observer editor Jack Betts writes that Gov. Beverly Perdue's unannounced visit with N.C. Department of Transportation workers helped strengthen her message that she'll be more hand's on than former Gov. Mike Easley.

It seems as though we've seen more of the governor in the 10 days she's been in office that we saw of her predecessor over the last year, though that's surely not the case. Still, the new governor seems to relish public appearances in a way that Mike Easley never did.

Meantime, WUNC's Laura Leslie writes on Hunter's Tavern that Perdue is also doing well at not being seen — in particular, skipping the presidential inaugural events in Washington.

"I think it was a savvy call," she writes. "Even if she'd paid for the trip out of her own pocket, the resulting photos of her at balls and parties would’ve been hard to swallow for state employees and other NC workers facing the very real possibility of losing their jobs."

Dannett Bassett, right, of Charlotte, got tickets to President Barack Obama's inauguration from her sister, actress Angela Bassett, left. (Photo by Ryan Teague Beckwith)

Soraya Kaloudis of Charlotte explains how she got front-row seats for Barack Obama's inauguration. (Video by Ryan Teague Beckwith)

Even a distant connection paid off for some people today.

Soraya Kaloudis, 50, got front-row seats at President Barack Obama's inauguration this morning from her niece's roommate. 

An employee of Bank of America in Charlotte, Kaloudis was just excited to be at the ceremony.

"I never thought I would go to an inauguration," she said. "I've never been politically involved in any way, but when my niece said she had tickets, I couldn't turn it down."

At last night's Arab-American inaugural ball, her niece, Mariam Al-Shawaf, told her just how good the seats were: Just below the platform, about as good as you can get without being a member of Congress or a Supreme Court justice.

Shawaf said that the tickets were almost an afterthought. Her roommate, who works for Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, one of the inaugural coordinators, had e-mailed her a year ago to ask if she wanted tickets.

Now, she said she finally has one on her aunt. 

"She shows us up every year with the best Christmas presents and my mom is always like 'Man, I'm not as creative as my sister,'" she said. "This time, we totally trumped her. We win for life, now."

Andrew Newby said the crowd was different.

A 32-year-old litigation technologist from Burlington, he drove up to the inauguration with his wife Kate and a friend, Heather Stam.

The three stood just outside a crush of people waiting for the ceremony to begin this morning. The bitter cold and a line that filled an entire city street from building to building did not seem to bother people, however.

"I've never seen such a large, happy crowd," he said.

History circled back on itself this morning.

As a fourth-grader in 1964, Joy Vanhook Nelson and nine classmates integrated Aycock Elementary in rural Orange County.

Racists called her names. The high-school student who drove the elementary school bus insisted she and her black classmates sit at the back. And the school was named for one of the leaders of the Wilmington race riots in 1898.

This morning, she watched the nation's first black president be inaugurated from a spot on the national mall.

"I'm just elated," she said. "Growing up in the hard south, integrating my elementary school and then to see this — a black president — you know what I think about that."

Nelson, 53, moved to Long Island, New York, in 2002 to teach special education, but she comes back to Cedar Grove during the holidays.

In December, she got together with five of her classmates.

"We stayed up until 4:30 a.m. reminiscing about integration — what our parents wanted for us — and talking about the election," she said. "Life is good."