WhoooooooooEEEEEEE did we have fun in Boston this weekend! And we thank all of our friends and enemies that knew we weren’t going to be home for three days and didn’t come over to steal our stuff. That was kind of you.
Day One: or, Why New York Drivers Are Retarded Cognitively Deficient
Last Thursday, we snuck out of work at around noon and met Sarah’s mom at the Three Little Bakers’ Dinner Theatre, where we watched our friend Nora play “Lola” in Damn Yankees, which was Highly Rad and Entertaining. (I also ate the first of many high-carb products that were sucked down all weekend like wingnuts into a shopvac.) I left the theater confused over who’s giving whom “the pain,” what that has to do with the Mambo, and why anybody would feel the need to say “Erp” about any of this.
Next, we headed home to pack up Sarah’s car with the basic necessities:
- Clothing
- Camera
- Manbag
- Our fat butts
and we got on the road. It was a pretty difficult drive; the traffic wasn’t TOO horrific (since we didn’t leave until close to 6pm), but unfortunately there was a lot of construction.
I also discovered that people in the section of I-95 that runs through the Bronx have very interesting ideas about when it is proper to come to a complete stop in the left lane of a 55mph freeway. I almost got us sandwiched between a Lincoln and some kind of large van because the van was following me rather closely, and the driver of the Lincoln noticed that cars roughly 2 miles in front of him were tapping their brakes, so he decided to simply stop and get his bearings. Bad times all around, although luckily I avoided subjecting us to ghastly and visceral deaths. So I guess there’s a silver lining.
We arrived in Framingham at around midnight, entered our friend Lynn’s righteous abode, had a beer each, and then were asleep before our heads hit the pillows (which leaves a nastier bruise than one might imagine when one’s head is 6’3″ from the ground and the pillow is only the thickness of an airbed from the floor).
Day Two: or, How are your nipples doing?
We awoke the next morning, bathed, got our bearings, and immediately went to the mall.
Hey, I needed a Red Sox visor.
Unfortunately, NOBODY had one. Even “Bob’s,” which had a wing o’ Red Sox paraphernalia the size of a Pep Boys, had no visors. Roughly 300 kinds of hats in all colors, of course, but hats tend to sit on the top of my head like beanies, because my skull is large and misshapen. We tried 3 or 4 different shops, and had no luck.
So we said to hell with that joint and headed into Beantown. We hit a little traffic at a toll, because apparently EZ-Pass is a relatively new thing up there. I swear, for every car that had EZ-Pass, there were roughly 400 that did not, all clogging up the coin lanes. They were so far backed up that even those of us that wanted to simply speed through the express lanes couldn’t GET to them.
This is a far cry from home, where the number of people who actually have to pay change at tolls is fairly low, roughly the same as the number of people that can’t figure out how to use the self-checkout lanes at grocery stores. (And it should be known that I hate all of you, because you caused Kmart to actually GET RID of their self-checkout lines because they discovered that roughly 50% of their customers had the mental capacity of a plate of deep-fried sheep testicles, and it was costing them more to keep employees standing around to help morons with the touch-sensitive screens than it was to simply have staffed checkout lines. Not that I’m bitter.)
We got into Brighton with relative ease, even found a free parking spot on the street Emily suggested we use, and found a most excellent Thai restaurant where we got lunch specials and drank a bottle of Beringer white zinfandel. It was pretty good, albeit very sweet; it was kind of like high class Thunderbird, if you can imagine. The food was excellent as well; I had sesame beef and scarfed it down. (See also: wingnuts vs. shopvac.)
Then we hopped on the T to ride down to Fenway Park. I’m all about the T. It was easy to use, reasonably fast (it took about 25 minutes to get downtown, and it probably would’ve taken us that long to drive there, plus another 20 minutes to find a spot, plus we would have been paying something like $847 to park downtown, plus one of us would have had to remain sober so we could get back home, so spending $1.25 apiece on the T was an absolute bargain), and the friendly driver was able to explain to us out-of-town yokels how to stick our money in the machine.
The only real downside to it is that every time someone mentioned “the T” I thought of the transvestite in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” who also had something s/he referred to as “My T.” (If you’re not getting my drift, let’s just say that his/her “T” was usually tucked in a very uncomfortable place.) There was a lot of involuntary shuddering at train stops this weekend.
Once we got down towards Fenway, we quickly found a Store 24 so I could buy a disposable camera, since I forgot to get the digital out of the car, and also because I knew I couldn’t come to Boston and not visit a Store 24. We also found some street vendors who sold me a sexy blue visor with a big red B on the front, and found some vintage looking hat for Hearnwife. I got some wild pictures of the outside of Fenway park that I hope to get developed this week and get posted. (I did later get some shots with the digital camera, mostly of the Boston Half Marathon, which I will cover tomorrow.)
Emily told us we should just head over to a bar nearby and watch the game from there, and she would meet us there after she got out of work. So we went into Jillian’s, where we drank the first of several dozen beers, and met a very nice fellow named Leo who
- informed us that he was turning 40 the following weekend,
- had a penchant for needling people,
- seemed to have a fun level of extreme violence simmering somewhere below the surface,
- became pathologically interested in the fact that a woman at a nearby table was wearing braces, and eventually went over to talk to her and got shot down like a WWII Messerschmitt, and,
- when Emily finally arrived, asked her without preamble: “So how are your nipples?” and then collapsed in a fit of raucous laughter.
We found him highly entertaining, and we all bought drinks for each other for several hours, until Leo finally left around the 7th inning. Luckily, we only had to go without entertainment for an inning or so, until two random fellows showed up who were EXTREMELY amused to meet people from Delaware. They had a lengthy argument about whether or not there were towns in Massachusetts named “Delaware” and, inexplicably, “Florida.” One of them was named Ryan, that’s about all I remember of them.
Sarah and I also took the opportunity to call Brian from the bar and make him put his son on the phone so that we could wish him a happy birthday. He told Sarah he loved her, so she got a little teary for a while. (As I recall, he had no interest in talking to me. Hardly surprising. I’m scary.)
The game itself was WILD. After Mike Timlin let the A’s tie it up, the mood in the bar changed DRASTICALLY, but it wasn’t like what would have happened in a Philadelphia bar. It was odd. In Philly, the fans would have simply started ordering drinks and just pretended the game wasn’t happening at all. In Boston, the fans were still riveted to the TV, albeit with the feeling of universal gloom that Red Sox fans know well. Truly bizarre.
After Ortiz hit the walk-off winner, everybody went nuts. Luckily, there wasn’t a riot in the streets or anything; everybody was just really happy. Drunk, but not violent drunk. It ruled.
We headed over to Legal Seafood, where we were informed there would be a 40 minute wait, so I went ahead and bought a dozen Krispy Kremes and looked over the new games at an Electronics Boutique. We actually got seated in under 15 minutes. I then polished off a lobster and a plate of clams and mussels, along with a portion of a bottle of wine.
I think we ate most of the Krispy Kremes on the T back to Emily’s apartment. Tomorrow: the startling conclusion! (Days three and four. There’s not actually anything startling, really, unless you consider 3-12 hours of liberal politics startling.)
