Monday, I partook in the tradition of attending Opening Day at Fenway Park. It was a beautiful day and the Red Sox defeated the Orioles 3-1. I clapped and pumped my fist and drank a lot of beer. Ticket sales at Fenway Park have declined this year, and the owners have had a tougher time than the previous few years of getting the fans in the seats. Blame the team's poor performance of last summer. Blame the ridiculous ticket prices. Blame the fact that last season wasn't the same without yelling "Yoooooooouk" and we had to settle for just a raucous rendition of Sweet Caroline. There are many reasons I'm sure. But, a few weeks ago, as a lure back to Fenway, the organization issued a press release that they would be selling beer for $5.00 in April! Much less than the $8.75 that we normally have to pay! And my sister, Stacy and I were stoked!! Until we got there. Those villains in the front office had foiled us again!
We went up to the beer counter and were surprised when the woman pouring asked us if we wanted "small" or "tall". "Tall", we replied, of course. We were confused when she handed us a regular-old-12-oz. cup of beer. Stacy whispered to me, "If this is a tall, how small is a small?" We learned soon after that it was very small when the guy in front of us came back to his seat with one. The $5.00 beer looked to be about half the size...which really isn't as big of a "deal" as I was expecting. So small, that my friend cleverly coined the phrase "The Pedroia Pilsner".
Despite this trickery by the evil geniuses at Fenway Park, people seemed to be buying up a lot of the $5.00 beer. In fact, (maybe as a result of a game that started one hour later than usual), the people sitting around us were trashed. The woman in the seat next to me passed out around the sixth inning. And from that point on, I kept one eye on the game and one on her as her friend tried to shove peanuts into her mouth and make it look like she was still awake.
But no one compared to the couple that was sitting in front of us. For reasons that will become clear, I'll refer to them as Mad Hater and Absentee Father. From the first pitch of the game, these two caught my attention. It wasn't just the fact that they were completely sauced and we still had nine innings to go. It was because of their gigantic age difference and that they introduced themselves as father and daughter, but were a bit too Mackenzie and John Phillips for my taste. Mad Hater was blond and looked as though her expression froze while duck-facing. Absentee Father was swaying in his seat and kept creeping closer and closer to the unlucky 25-year old sitting next to him.
Right around the fourth, I got up for a beer refill. When I hit the beer line, imagine my surprise to find that the kegs were tapped out. Apparently, Red Sox fans can consume more Dixie-sized beers than the front office was expecting! As a result, the lines for the remaining beer counters were ridiculous. Didn't really stop me from standing in one though...
Meanwhile, back at my seat, Mad Hater had noticed that her dad-boyfriend's new reluctant buddy, the unlucky 25-year old, was wearing a Bruins jersey underneath his Red Sox one. So, she asked him about it. Not sensing the trap, Reluctant Buddy told her that he was going to the Bruins game after the baseball game. For some inexplicable reason, this made Mad Hater mad. She began to scream, "You like the BRUINS??? HOW could you like the BRUINS?? What is WRONG with you???" If she had been joking, it would have been ok...odd, but still ok. But, she honestly seemed livid that this guy, a fan of one Boston team, would DARE to be a fan of another Boston team. I missed all of this, but when I returned to my seat, I returned to an atmosphere of uncomfortable silence and my sister filled me in on what had gone down.
Right around the time that I returned, Absentee Father earned his nickname by disappearing. I'm guessing that this was around the fifth inning. A couple of innings later, Mad Hater got up. I thought that they were gone for good. But sometime in the ninth, Mad Hater returned. I overheard her say to the Reluctant Buddy, "He never came back????"--surprised that Absentee Father had clearly abandoned her (which is another tell-tale sign that he's probably not really her father). She called his cell phone a few times and he didn't answer. She dropped her sunglasses in the row in front of her and had an awesome struggle trying to get them back. I began to feel sorry for her until she flipped us all off. And with a duck-faced huff, she got up and left.
I'll never know if Mad Hater found her "dad". I like to think of them passed out together underneath a disability ramp in the bowels of Fenway Park, their middle fingers permanently stuck up in the air, serving as a reminder to all of us to drink responsibly--even if it's only Dixie-sized beer.
No comments:
Post a Comment