6.) The proximity to Easter — As it will this year, The Masters frequently concludes on Easter Sunday.  I’m not a Christian, but I generally think, I swear,  that Christians are pretty cool.  Still, Easter rests on a fairly creepy mythos, and a non-Christian like me can—in my part of the world, anyway—pretty easily get inundated by it.  Maybe, you think to yourself, a little golf will provide a nice Sunday-afternoon distraction from all that?  Think again.  In 1993, after taking his second Masters title, Bernhard Langer found time to note that Easter was “the day when [his] Lord and Savior rose from the dead” and that it meant more to win on the day he “celebrate[d] the resurrection of [his] Lord and Savior.”  Langer’s not alone, either: As the close of the last linked article (from The Baptist Advocate) indicates, many different players have found golfing wins a chance to bear Christian witness.  The Masters at Easter invites that.  No thank you.

7.) Butler Cabin — If there’s any duller, more awkward winner’s celebration in sports, I haven’t seen it.  Television viewers have to withstand an uninformative conversation with the low-amateur, if one made the cut, before a seated, tepid panel discussion featuring Jim Nantz and the champion breaks out.  Ok, “breaks out” is too strong a phrase.  In fact, I usually start a nap about this time.  More energy and excitement (and, hey, better lighting), please?

8.) Yes, the green jacket — Congratulations.  You’ve just won the highest honor in your sport.  In celebration of that, we’re doing to dress you up like a Shriner.  Enjoy.

9.) Larry Mize — He’s back, you know.

10.) Having it both ways — The Masters is supposed to be all about the tradition (”it’s a tradition unlike any other,” Nantz repeatedly intones on CBS), but the course has seen many changes.  Once, the controversy was the switch from Bermuda to bentgrass.  More recently, the course underwent significant changes to fend off long-hitters like Tiger Woods.  This is not the same golf course that Snead, Hogan, and Nelson once played, and we’d all be better off if we recognized that.

1.) The small field — The Masters is supposed to be one of the four great championship events of the year, yet the field is small.  It’s essentially an invitational event.  A championship is supposed to tell us who the “best” is.  What’s the best of an invitational field?  I dunno, but my tennis club does the same thing.  Why isn’t CBS there?  I’ll take the U.S. Open’s qualifying free-for-all any day.

2.) The tradition — Unlike Wimbledon, where the tradition is almost charming, it’s stultifying in Augusta.  And, yes, I’m saying there’s too much of the “wrong kind” of tradition.  Lee Trevino didn’t feel welcome there.  Lee Elder qualified for the tournament 15 years before the club had—in the 1990s!—its first African-American member.  There’s a good reason Martha Burk was protesting the event.  Yuck.

3.) CBS’s reverential coverage — As I understand it, the club mandates a certain tone in the coverage.  If I’m forced to choose between the raucous(?) Jack Whitakers and Gary McCords of the world and the unctuous, Masters-approved Jim Nantzes of the world, I’m going with the Whitakers and McCords every time.

4.) Larry Mize

5.) Exclusivity — I’m not welcome—as, ahem, a “patron”—at the tournament, and you’re not, either.  This is from the tourney’s website: Tournament or ‘Series’ Badges (Thursday through Sunday) have been sold to those on our patron list which was closed due to demand in 1972. A waiting list began in 1972, and was closed in 1978. It reopened in 2000, and it too is now closed. No applications for ‘Series’ Badges are currently being accepted.

If the Phillies win this World Series, this is surely the game that everyone will remember.  After an afternoon of heavy rain, last night’s game started an hour-and-a-half late and it didn’t end until nearly 2 a.m.  By then, I was damp and chilled to the bone.  It didn’t matter.  The Phillies kept it together, winning thrillingly in the bottom of the ninth to take a 2-1 lead in the series.  Jubilation!

I don’t have any special insights into the play of the game.  MLB.com’s coverage of the game is very good, and it details the crazy ninth inning—in which Eric Bruntlett (who relieved leftfielder Pat Burrell late in the game when the Phils had a good lead) was hit by a pitch, then stole second on a wild pitch, then immediately stole third when catcher Dioner Navarro’s throw to second was itself wild.  After the Rays intentionally walked two Phillies to load the bases, Phils catcher Carlos Ruiz came to the plate and hit the first walk-off infield single in World Series history.  (This single occurred despite the Rays’ use of five infielders.  In the stands, it took me a minute to figure out why one of the outfielders was running to the dugout.  He needed an infielder’s glove.)  It was quite an end to a game that saw the Phillies take an early lead, only to let the Rays tie it in the eighth.  (The New York Times coverage of the game is good, too, and I read it as soon as I got home.  Also, check out the NYT’s cool slide show.)

Earlier, as the rain came, in excess, in the afternoon, I wondered how I’d even get to the game.  A few minutes before I need to leave my apartment for the train station, I realized that service on the train line was suspended (thanks to some downed trees).  My seatmate was in Wilmington, having moved early in the day to a new house.  He wasn’t, I knew, figuring on going out of his way to pick me up.  There was no doubt I was going to get to the ballpark, though, even if I had to take a cab from the burbs.  My seatmate rescued me, anyway, and our drive to the ballpark took us through torrential rain.  It seemed absurd to be going to a baseball game.

When we got to the park, we immediately got wet from the ankles down, as the parking lot was flooded.  I’d stay damp throughout the night.  At the ballpark, we eventually found a rail to lean on in the second tier (we were sitting in Section 204) and waited.  And waited.  An hour later, it was still pouring.  I started to hope the game would get rained out so I could come back on Sunday, which had a sweet weather forecast.  About 75 minutes after the game should’ve started, though, when it was still raining hard, the groundskeepers started taking the tarp off.  It seemed nuts.  But they knew what was about to happen: The rain was going to stop, and the game was going to start.  A little after 10 p.m., 45-year-old Jamie Moyer took the mound, and the game was on.

I can’t say I enjoyed every minute of the game.  I enjoyed it when the Phils took the early lead, of course.  But after the rain left (and it did leave for good, before the first pitch), it was replaced by a strong, chilly wind.  I’d worn layers, but I guess I should’ve worn gloves.  My fingers, and the tip of my nose, started to hurt.  I kept warm by jumping up (a lot), clapping (a lot), and high-fiving my neighbors (a lot).  When the Rays tied the game in the eighth, though, I wondered how I’d survive too many extra innings.  I would’ve stayed as long as necessary, but it would’ve hurt.  Thanks to Eric Bruntlett and Carlos Ruiz, I didn’t have to find out how much it actually would’ve hurt.

It was nearly 3:25 a.m. when I rolled back into the apartment.  I was still smiling.

Go Phillies!

P.S. The video is of Taylor Swift’s rendition of the national anthem.  I didn’t actually see her last night, because my seatmate and I were struggling to get to our section at the time.  I heard her performance, though, and I thought Swift did an amazing job.

Hey, long time no blog.

For once, there’s a good reason, too.  Last Friday, I realized that—through the combination of Columbus Day and a couple of leave days—I had five free days ahead of me.  And no plans.  So I jumped on Travelocity, looking for someplace to go, someplace I could get to both cheaply and easily.  One destination stood out: Las Vegas.

I’ve been to Vegas at least once a year for several years in a row (and I’m headed there again in December for the National Finals Rodeo).  I’m comfortable there; there’s always something to do; I know I’ll have fun.  So I booked the trip.  Woo hoo!

That’s how I found myself, on Sunday night at 10 p.m., at the Luxor for Cirque du Soleil’s new show, CRISS ANGEL Believe.

(Yes, that’s how Cirque spells it.  Creative capitalization and boldface, huh?  [Insert eyeroll here.])

If you know me well, you already know I’m a big, big fan of Cirque du Soleil.  In fact, after this visit to Las Vegas, I’ve seen all six Cirque shows currently playing there (and I think I’ve seen five of Cirque’s traveling shows).  I don’t have to be sold on Cirque shows.  I go into them convinced, already, that I’m going to have fun, be entertained, see something different.

But CRISS ANGEL Believe let me down.

I guess I should issue some disclaimers.  First, and most importantly, I got bird poop on me—on my face!—at the show.  Really. Now, I don’t think I would’ve liked the show even if I’d gotten through it bird poop-free, but let me be clear: Getting bird poop on your face, at a fancy show, at a fancy show you paid $100+ to see, is absolutely unacceptable.  It’s disgusting.  It’s something you never forget.  Hmph.  Cirque du Soleil, you owe me a refund—at a minimum.

And I can’t believe that Cirque hasn’t figured out the problem of the bird poop on its own.  It must’ve occurred to someone that if the show has dozens of birds fly over the audience, every single night, there are going to be some, well, waste issues from time to time.  These birds are well-fed, I’m sure.  They’re probably stressed, too—or, at least, not thrilled to be indoors with hundreds of people.  And, well, even if they weren’t stressed, they’d still have to poop once in awhile, wouldn’t they?

And when the birds flew over the audience on Sunday night, about 15 minutes into the show, I got slammed in the face, on my left cheek right below my eyeglasses, with a little chunk of nasty detritus.  Ewww.  Ewww city.  It stung, and it was foul.  I couldn’t believe it.  What if it had hit me in the eye?  Won’t it eventually hit someone in the eye?  Can you imagine having to leave CRISS ANGEL Believe because you’ve gotten bird crap in your eye?  If these birds fly over enough audiences, it’s bound to happen, right?  Maybe it has already happened….  Gee.

Anyway, there I sat, in the middle of a row, in a dark theater, wondering how the hell I was going to get bird poop off my face, wondering if I could get some bird disease right there at the Luxor, wondering how Cirque du Soleil let something this stupid happen.  For a minute, I was stunned.  I didn’t see how I could get out of my seat without disrupting the show for a dozen people….  I calculated, reevaluated.  When I looked around, I realized that I already had what I needed.  I had a napkin and a special $12 Cirque du Soleil mixed drink, apple-y and tasty.  I hated to sacrifice the drink, but, of course, I hated having bird poop on my face even more.  So I dipped my napkin into the drink and got to work on my face.  The drink had alcohol in it, right?  And it was wet.  It would get my face clean and, I hoped, kill any bird germs on my face.

As I said, I don’t think I would’ve liked CRISS ANGEL Believe even if I’d had a poop-free evening.  And maybe my second disclaimer helps explain why: I just don’t know Criss Angel’s work.  I gather he’s a well-regarded magician, with a TV show…but I’ve never seen his work, and I didn’t even know about his TV show until I was sitting in the theater.  He seemed to have a lot of fans in the audience.  Maybe they were prepared to like the show, despite the incoherent plot, despite the lack of any impressive illusions, despite the lack of any Cirque-quality acrobatics or spectacle.  Maybe all they needed to see was Angel’s innocent face.  Maybe they just needed to get close to his rock’n'roll vibe.

But that wasn’t enough for me.

Truthfully—and this is my final disclaimer—I’m not even particularly interested in magic.  Or illusions.  Or whatever it is exactly that Criss Angel trades in.  But I absolutely think I could’ve enjoyed some good magic, especially if it had been integrated into a high-quality Cirque spectacle.  Instead, my audience got some birds produced out of thin air, Criss Angel (er, should that be CRISS ANGEL?) suddenly appearing ten feet from where he seemed to be, and Criss Angel split in two (temporarily, of course).  That’s not enough magic for a magic show.

We also got a ridiculous plot line (why did there have to be a plot at all?), some good—but not great—dancing, and plenty of exposure to Criss Angel’s impressive pecs and hair.

Oh, and I got the bird poop on my face.

No thank you, Cirque du Soleil.

What will I remember about this afternoon’s game, which gave the Phils a 2-0 in the National League Championship Series?

• I’ll remember that Brett Myers pitched just well enough but, startlingly, had three hits (and three RBIs) of his own.
• I’ll remember how the Phillies, with two outs, managed in the second inning to score four runs on five hits (without a home run).
• I’ll remember a helluva catch by centerfielder Shane Victorino to end a two-out threat by the Dodgers in the seventh inning.
• I’ll remember Manny Ramirez’s three-run, fourth-inning homer, which closed a six-run lead to three.  I’ll remember that the hometown fans, who’d relaxed just a bit, tensed up.
• I’ll remember that it was unseasonably warm, like a June day—and almost too sunny for the first hour.
• I’ll remember how Brad Lidge got in a little bit of a jam, again, in the ninth inning, only to end the game with a strikeout of Nomar Garciaparra.
• But, mostly, I’ll probably remember the two guys sitting next to us (in Section 105, in the outfield)—how they fretted and yelled; how they hugged whenever anything good happened; how they spilled four (four!) beers, causing me to smell like hops; how one studiously ignored me, while the other slapped me (hard!) on the back and good-naturedly tried to high-five me; how one yelled at a Dodgers-jersey-wearing fan “not to dress like a fag,” when he had gay men sitting on both his right and his left; how they were horrifying, and yet intriguing, to me.

What will I regret about this afternoon’s game?

• I’ll regret that I didn’t high-five enough strangers, or even the buddy who joined me.
• I’ll regret that I didn’t start the game with a roast pork sandwich from Tony Luke’s.
• I’ll regret that I didn’t wear shorts.  (How many more chances will I get this year, anyway?)
• But, mostly, I’ll probably regret that I didn’t purposely spill beer back on my crazy neighbors, apologizing for being a “clumsy fag.”  Or slip one, or both, of them my phone number.

Final score: 8-5.

I haven’t posted a collection of links in awhile.  I’ve just been too fixated on the Phillies, I guess.  No—wait!—it’s not even possible to be too fixated on the Phillies.  Anyway, I haven’t stopped wasting spending time on the web, so there’s quite a backlog.

• What’s the best thing in this week’s New York Times Magazine?  I think it has to be this piece on doughnuts, which, among other things, has Washington Irving saying that a New Amsterdam table “was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat and called dough nuts.”  Be sure to check out Stephen Lewis’s accompanying photographs, too.  They’re amazing.  (That’s not one of Lewis’s above.  Sadly, I can’t afford food porn of that quality.)
• I’m becoming a big fan of “The Wild Side,” evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson’s NYT blog.  A few weeks ago, Judson blogged about a gene variation in men that was associated, in a Swedish study, with an inability to maintain long-term monogamous relationships.  The very next week, she wrote about the evolution of male-only asexual reproduction in a few unusual species.  It’s good to be reminded just how freaky nature truly is.
• It’s certainly been a long time—too long—since my last date, but I’m not ready to resort to a cuddle party to get some basic human contact.  Bizarrely, the local paper, The Inky, devoted many, many column inches to the topic.  The article just made me want to buy gallon after gallon of Lysol, hand sanitizer, and various other cootie-killers.  Ewwww.
• Americans can get married nearly anywhere they want—the backyard, Las Vegas, the halftime of an Oklahoma City Thunder game.  It seems like a basic human right, doesn’t it?  (For straight people only.  Hmmm.)  It’s not that way everywhere, of course.  In England, the rules have loosened up just a little bit, but there’s a long way to go.
• Pop or soda?  Or just coke? As I’m sure you know, what we Americans call our, um, soft drinks varies pretty dramatically from region to region.  In the Midwest, it’s pop.  In the northeast and California, it’s soda.  In the South, it’s coke.  Strange Maps recently featured a great map that shows off this regional variation.  I grew up in Oklahoma, which, as you’ll see, is one of the places where pop and coke collide.  I grew up with “pop,” in one of those counties in northeastern Oklahoma where 50-80% of the population prefers that term.  But it’s not what I say anymore.  After a decade-plus in Philly, I’ve converted to “soda.”  I’m a traitor.
• Speaking of great maps, I enjoyed the NYT’s interactive map showing how well nations have done at the Summer Olympics over the years.  Now is a good time, of course, to get a good view of how the Beijing Games played out.
• Like any good devotee of Belgian beer, I’ve been closely following the political upheaval between the country’s Flemish and Walloon populations—and just hoping it doesn’t mess up the beer.  If you haven’t been following the steady slide toward devolution, here’s a good primer from BBC News as well as an article on political unhappiness in Flanders.
• Etan Horowitz, who writes for the Orlando Sentinel and who happens to be one of my “buddies” on Twitter, explains how to change your email address as painlessly as possible.  This is something I need to get my parents—who insist on sharing an email address provided by their small-town ISP—to read.  Horowitz, by the way, is a fan of Gmail.  Me, too.

After 42 years of baseball fandom, I finally made it—personally—to the playoffs.  Last year, of course, my Phillies made an unexpected, but short, visit to the playoffs, but they did it without me.  A good deed (that’s a link to my old site) got in the way.  This year, of course, I was with the Phillies all season, and I wasn’t going to let anything keep me from the playoffs.  So there I was today, in Section 421 (that’s a bit of a come-down from my normal seats), at 3 p.m. on a weekday, ready to root.

If you’re a baseball fan, you know what happened.  Cole Hamels pitched a beautiful game for the Phillies.  The Phillies didn’t show a lot on offense, but they had enough—especially when combined with some ugly defense by the Brewers.  At least for the first eight innings, the Brewers had nothing whatsoever going on offense: In fact, the score for much of the game—Phillies 3, Brewers 0—underestated how dominating the Phillies were.

It’s never easy, though.  And for the second straight game, Phillies closer Brad Lidge looked, well, human.  He gave up two hits and a run.  With two outs, he walked J.J. Hardy, and a wild pitch to Corey Hart allowed Brewers baserunners to go to second and third.  Ugh.  But Lidge held on, managing to strike out Hart to end the game.  There was a massive sigh of relief in Citizens Bank Park.  Final score: 3-1.

It wasn’t at all my most enjoyable day at the ballpark.  For one thing, everything just seemed to matter so dang much.  The attention of 45,000+ fans was on every pitch, every catch, every throw.  I was tense.  Although the Phillies looked like the better team, the Brewers were never out of it.  It was too close!  And worst of all, it repeatedly rained—just enough that I didn’t want to leave my seats, but enough that I was pretty thoroughly wet by the end.

I’d do it all again, though.  Of course.  Go Phils!

Random weirdness at the ballpark: Two straight men in my row were pretty much overcome by emotion.  One hugged the other at the start of the game, apologizing—if I overheard correctly—that he didn’t usually know how to express his affection for his friend.  Somehow or other, the playoff game made the mushiness acceptable.

Straight men are hard to figure out sometimes.  Hee.

Last night’s game was my last regular-season game of the year.  I hope it won’t be my last game whatsoever of the year!  It was an exciting game—but only for four innings.  Brett Myers pitched poorly from the start, and the Phillies were lucky to give up only three runs through the first four innings.  In fact, Myers—late of the minor leagues, where he surely belongs and will inevitably return next season—gave up an incredible 10 hits in four-and-a-third innings.  Still, after four, the Braves and Phillies were tied, 3-3.

The fifth inning was the undoing of Myers and the Phillies.  Myers walked one of the Braves and gave up a double to another, prompting manager Charlie Manuel to go to the bullpen.  Soon enough, reliever Scott Eyre was giving up a three-run homer to Chipper Jones, the next holder of the League’s batting title.  (Jones, still suffering from shoulder problems, didn’t come into the game until the fifth inning.  To have a shoulder injury and be so powerful!  He’s amazing, darn it.)

The Braves scored six runs in the decisive fifth inning, and the game was effectively over.  The final score: 10-4.

After the top of the fifth, my attention—and the attention of 40,000 other Phillies fans—immediately turned to the scoreboard.  We watched as the Mets squandered a grand slam by Carlos Delgado and then managed to lose the game altogether in the tenth inning.

It would be better, of course, if the Phillies—who held onto a one-and-a-half game lead over the Mets—forcefully took the Division title.  But we’re not too proud to have the Mets hand the title to us, believe me.

Having neglected my all-important beer education for most of the summer, I knew I had to attend last night’s beer class by Tom Peters—the renowned owner of Monk’s Cafe, the premiere Belgian-beer destination in Philly (which is really saying something in this Belgium-crazy city)—at Tria Fermentation School.  Peters wanted to show off sour flavors, and he brought nine examples.  I’d tried four or five of them before, but it was still a real pleasure to be able to easily compare and contrast so many sour ales.

Of the nine, I’d say the biggest revelations were the Goudenband from Brouwerij Liefmans and Russian River’s Supplication.  I hadn’t heard good things about Liefmans previously, but the Goudenband, a classic Belgian brown ale, was absolutely delightful.  The “sweetest” beer of the evening, it was still sour enough and offered up some interesting wine and cherry notes.  I’d have to describe the Supplication with similar terms—in that it’s made with sour cherries and aged in pinot noir barrels—but it struck me as a lot more wine-like than the Goudenband.  Sour and delicious, that’s for sure.

On my next pilgrimage to The Beeryard in Wayne, the beer distributor of my dreams, I may be bringing a case of the Goudenband home with me.  The Supplication isn’t generally available west of the Mississippi River, but I believe it can be had in the Philly area, too.  Those crazy West Coast brewers have realized what a market we have here….

Of the beers I knew already last night, my favorites were the Cantillon Gueuze and Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen’s Kriek.  The Cantillon is one of those beers I’d put on my desert-island list (i.e., what five beers will you take with you to the desert island along with the sexy, athletic nymphomaniac?).  I liked the Kriek from 3 Fonteinen much better than I did a few months ago when the brewery’s Armand Debelder was in town for Philly Beer Week.

So I enjoyed myself last night.  I have to say, though, that I’m sometimes a little bit uncomfortable with the way that beer snobs (and I say this with love, as a bona fide beer snob myself) fetishize some flavors, like sours, over others.  I like sour flavors as much as anyone, but it ain’t heroic of me.  If you listened to some of my classmates last night, you’d think that only the most gauche beer drinker in the world would enjoy sweet flavors.  Well, hmph.  Different types of flavors are just different types of flavors.  Can’t we enjoy sour flavors, bitter flavors, and—hey—even sweet flavors sometimes, too?

P.S. I really enjoyed one of the cheeses provided by Tria last night—Beehive Cheese Company’s Barely Buzzed, a cheddar cheese made nearly irresistible with a coffee rub.  Put some of that in my fridge, ok?

I’m no poet, as you’ll soon see, but my last post—which mentioned the decline in firefly populations—caused me to remember a poem I’d written in grad school.  And when I finally located the old folder with my grad school-era poems, I found two poems mentioning fireflies.  (These were probably written in 1990 and 1991.)

Letter to My Sister

It is humid here, and hot.
At dusk, I sit on my balcony
to feel the occasional breeze.
I let my bare legs hang over the edge,
despite (my fear of) the height.

As it gets darker,
I bring out a Mexican beer or a Coke
to accompany the folk music
on my portable radio.

Every night, I sit
and await the shade of night
that best shows off the lightning bugs.

The fireflies make me think back
to Grandma Vera’s house,
where kin from far off would come
and gather near the front porch.
The kids from back east (or out west),
where there are apparently no lightning bugs,
would try to catch them in jars
to take back home.

Only now,
having moved a thousand miles from you
and often feeling very lonely,
do I really appreciate the lightning bugs.

They connect this place to home,
and to you.

Grief

From the balcony,
I realize there are
no more
fireflies.  There haven’t been
any
for weeks.
It is too hot.

In four weeks,
I will be moving away
from this place and
from this balcony.

I do not even know
where I’m going.

But I know
I will never
know the fireflies
this well
again.

© 2008 Rivers Are Damp