So I was trying for a very long time to figure out some way in which I could relate today’s haze of Red-Sox-related joy to the actual Bardolatrous subject of this blog. I noted last night, whilst watching the post-game blather, that one of the owners (I forget who) referred to the team as a “band of brothers” and I thought in passing about people quoting Shakespeare without even really being aware that they’re quoting Shakespeare, but really, I cannot be false and try to pretend that’s really what’s on my mind, simply because it happens to be pertinent.
In fact, I am seeking vent for my excitement because I spent eight hours in a van today when I wanted to be doing the Papelbon dance. And because yesterday, when the game ended, I was Riverdancing all by myself in the basement of a host home in Canton, NY, trying not to make any noise as everyone else in the house was asleep. And even when I had watched games in the student center, I was generally one of the last people there. Granted, perhaps this was because I had frightened the college students by wincing and shouting, for I have a hard time being anything but an active audience member; nevertheless, part of me kept thinking, ‘Are you really telling me I’m more interested in the playoffs and the Series than a full campus of college boys?’
And in fact, I knew I would miss my friends, and I knew I would miss the theatre community in Boston, but I had no idea how much I would miss little old Boston itself. I loved it, surely, but I underrated how much it had begun to feel like my own, and how much I had felt that I belonged to it. Now, in my dreams, my fairy godmother whisks me off to Boston, just for today, and everyone is smiling at everyone else on the T, and exchanging banter at Dunkin’ Donuts, and lightheartedly bashing the Yankees, and I walk around the streets, watching Boston being Boston. Whilst many would claim this vision of Boston to be an improbable fiction, I know that sporting victories make tight little communities out of big cities, and TODAY, the only part about this fantasy that is false is the existence of my fairy godmother.
(Also false is the fact that, the existence of a fairy godmother presupposed, I’d spend my whole wish on just going to Boston. As long as magic is involved, I think I’d be asking for an actual baseball player.)
But seriously, in the end, I suppose this is somewhat pertinent to the topic of touring, if not Mr. Shakespeare himself, for I’ve found that there is nothing like a state of homelessness (though not ‘houselessness’) to make me realise that I once had a home. There is nothing like loss of identity to make one grasp at identity, which is why Americans often put such store into their roots, saying, ‘I’m Irish,’ or ‘I’m Italian,’ or ‘I’m Greek,’ and why I, feeling that I have cast off almost everything that I recognise as myself, think hopefully, ‘Yes, that’s me, Boston is my town.’
Because even though I’m so close—we’re only in Connecticut—I feel like I’m hearing of the world’s goings-on as if from orbit, a kind of space station of hotel rooms. But you can bet that I’m doing the Cinco Ocho Jig and the Youk Running Man in zero gravity.
Oh, and the title of the post is in iambic pentatmeter. I thought that, at least, might tie things together.
I am remembering when you were an infant asleep in my arms at the Phillies game and the roving camera came around and beamed your picture on to the big stadium screen and 25,000 people went “Awwwwww!”
And then there was the teeny Phillies shirt that I sewed a number “9″ on the back when you were about five and in love with Von Hayes.
So before there was Boston for you, there was baseball—though indeed the Sox were always our American League favorites (the Yankees our villains), dating back to my own college conversion experience, when they were in the World Series too. The only problem with the World Series this year was that the whole post season was over so fast and now we have no baseball for a long (cold, dark) time.
Maybe you will be in Florida for spring training!
xoxox, M
I am not so fickle as to have forgotten that I was in love with Von Hayes, simply because I’m now also in love with (amongst others) a man who wears a Bud Light box on his head with eye holes cut out. (For anyone who doesn’t believe me, I can provide photographic evidence.) I think Von Hayes may have been the first man I was ever in love with, unless I was in love with Charles Barkley first.
Nor have I forgotten that, somewhat later in life, when we were living in MLB-forsaken Indiana and dependent upon the Sox of the White variety, I was also in love with Frank Thomas. You may recall that I had a poster of him, which I think I hung on the other side of the door from the movie poster of Kenny Branagh’s Henry V.
Which just proves that I’ve been this wierd all my life.
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