Saturday, July 02, 2005 I hear you manage a baseball team
Last night I went to see the Orioles play baseball. It's the first time I've ever done that kind of thing, although I went to a sad, slow minor league game when I was a kid. This time, I was sitting out in the heat in another town, and my company was of a better quality. Tracy promised to explain the infield fly rule, if it ever came up, but it didn't.
Some guys gave us tickets, just as I was about to put my college education to use and scam discounted tickets with my old student ID. No matter that the photo in the ID features me with chopped-off white-blonde hair.
The free tickets were for seats that were pleasantly high up, so that I could see the little men running around on the field, and see all kinds of people in the stands, too. A whole bunch of people getting together, especially when I'm not expected to talk to them and they're not supposed to think anything about me, is one of my favorite things in the world.
A woman in front of us a couple rows down clapped for everything, and whenever there was the least oppourtunity to rise from her seat and dance, she did it. Kids all around us had giant foam fingers. "Just take that little girl's. You're bigger than she is," my enabler said. I said that it sounded good. "I'll take it from her, and then you fight her dad."
We eavesdropped, which wasn't hard. A gang of the girls who wear Abercrombie and Fitch and their irrascible male companions sat next to us. Best, best, best quote of the night: "SO! I was going through the yearbook? And! I saw these girls!!! And! I'd always thought it was one person, like, for four years. But it was totally TWINS!!! I got so freaked out."
We stayed for the fireworks afterwards, because mentally, I'm about nine years old in a lot of key ways, and to leave before the fireworks seemed to go against nature. When I was a kid, my family was a "lawnchairs on the river bank across from the stadium" family, so fireworks have always been these distant, muffled things. These were pretty, and loud, and it was nice to know for sure that they weren't gunshots.
Of course, then it was a little late, and after we walked to Fell's and got some pizza, our light rail passes were useless, so we decided to see if we could have a good time there. We couldn't. We tried. One bar snubbed us. The two bartenders who were there to serve us and the four other people, two of whom already had their drinks, walked past the spot where we patiently waited again and again, as footage of some sort of beach tug-of-war contest enacted by girls in bikinis played silently on the flat screen TVs behind them. It was a good five minutes before they grudgingly poured our too-expensive beer. Then Sting came on the stereo. Then they ate our fucking dust, because there are some things that life is too short to put up with.
Other bars had fatal flaws, too: cover charges, extreme dudeliness. One turned out to contain my boss, and there's nothing wrong with that, but my workplace haunts my dreams enough that I like to set boundaries when I can.
We decided to go home and play Scrabble instead, and although we had to direct the cabbie fairly meticulously ("I'm new!" he said.), that's just what happened. The way the game was won nearly made up for the mild (I can't lie to you, internet: I only have so much of a capacity to care about sports) sadness over the defeat of the Orioles. On the last turn, somebody used all his or her letters to make three short words on a triple word score. Now someone else's honor is at stake. Hello, July. Hello! posted by Frenz | 7/02/2005 04:50:00 PM
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