Editor’s Note: Long before Cindy Sheehan captured the media’s attention by setting up camp outside President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tx. and demanding a meeting with him, a woman braved weather and a generation of curious onlookers to push her cause, just feet away from the White House. DCist’s resident interviewer Jeff Simmermon took to the streets to find out who this woman is and what she is doing there.

Concepcion Picciotto is familiar to tourists, D.C. locals and at least five Presidents. She resides in Lafayette Park in a handmade plastic tent between two large handpainted signs protesting presidential corruption and nuclear weapons.

But she refuses to discuss her age and her reasons for conducting such an involved, one-woman onslaught on the White House. When asked about her family, she replies in a thick Spanish accent, “The world is my family. I am a citizen of the world.”

We caught up with her under the hot, heavy cover of an imminent downpour this week to learn a little bit more about her than what we could read on her signs.