A town of loveable misfits trapped in a dome after a long-in-the-making environmental disaster, followed by an arbitrary, disastrous governmental response. The well-known landscape transformed into a devastated El Dorado, smashed windows, the rantings of passing madmen, national guard patrols. Desperation, violence, lawlessness.
Springfield, USA = New Orleans, LA.
Sitting in the AMC theater on the West Bank, we had a hard time deciding what was intentional and what was coincidental in the symbolism of the Simpsons movie. At times, I felt like heads nodded in knowing, rather than shaking in laughter. When the Dome settles down around the city and the citizens of Springfield are trapped with each other, well, that's a No Exit reality that everyone in the theater could imagine, or knew someone who lived through, or lived through themselves. When the Simpsons return to town after their escape and find the onslaught of urban apocalypse, we all saw that. The broken buildings and breakdown in society, there was something so very usual to them from a New Orleans perspective. Even the wild ramblings of bartender Moe, declaring himself in charge, bandanna around his head, he looked and sounded like something out of the parking lot camps or mayoral press conferences that sprouted up after the storm.
Probably a lot will be written (maybe already has, I didn't read the reviews) about the environmentalist lean to the movie's storyline, the way the characters took political shots at a variety of targets for short-sightedness and lack of preemptive action. That was all easy to see and I thought they pulled it off pretty well, though overall the movie was a little too direct in many ways, generally not as weird as the show. Going in, I was looking for that quirky dumbness and the sneaky satire, some comfort in the well-known devolution of family life.
But what crept in over and again was a feeling one sometimes gets when watching fictional accounts in the wake of the storm. What I'm speaking of is different than what we get when watching the sudden collapse of buildings in The Transformers, the helplessness of humans against larger forces that was (intentionally) reminiscent of 9/11. Then it's the thrill of vicarious threat, of "what it was like," perhaps the return, finally, of the attacker who left us waiting for more, a cinematic perversion of Stockholm Syndrome.
Instead, the familiarity with some scenes in the Simpsons movie elicits a response somewhere between a sympathetic shrug and a "whatever" shrug, i.e. nice cartoon, nice ending, check out our neighborhoods. By no means a resentment of representation, or lack of appreciation for the animated protest, but a feeling of permanence in the face of flashing image: in theaters across the country, that landscape appears and disappears; here, it was outside when we entered, and awaits us when we exit.
As stated, the parallels between the movie and real life during and after the storm were easy to see, and I'd hope American audiences take something from that.
But, at least for me, in New Orleans, the parallels drove home what a separate, trapped audience we remain. Not simply that life is stranger that fiction, but that fiction is stranger when seen from this life.
When the rain finally sputtered out on Sunday, we drove to Holt Cemetery, burial ground of paupers and the King of Jazz, Buddy Bolden (1877-1931). Tipped off to Bolden’s location by a documentary we’d watched on Saturday (part of an upcoming project, sketchy details to come…), we found the cemetery on Buddy Bolden Place, off of City Park Avenue, behind Delgado College. The gate stood open, the guard’s house was boarded up, the door to the fuse box hung open, streaked orange with rust. Another car sat in the rough driveway, apparently belonging to the slight, brown-haired kid who paced between tombstones, cellphone to his ear, keeping his distance from us.
The marker for Bolden stood out in its uprightness and clean face. Erected in 1998, the pale granite tombstone notes that Bolden is somewhere in the cemetery; he was buried in an unmarked grave after spending the last 24 years of his life in an asylum.
Holt is one of the only "underground" cemeteries in the city, i.e. inhabitants are buried in the earth, not housed in above ground tombs. When Katrina hit, this peculiarity meant severe devastation for the grave sites.
Across the yard, markers of all shapes and states of disrepair stood in front of plots covered in tarps, in gravel, in mud, in burnt charcoal, in junk. Flotsam left behind from the flood waters lay half-buried along half-buried flowers, tombstones broken in half, piles of bright junk arranged to suggest ceremony, meaning. A “Twister” pad lay in front of a squat, hand-painted piece of concrete, with a plastic chair standing guard. Many of the tombstones were hand-painted, some only planks of wood hammered into a cross. The dates ranged from mid-nineteenth century births to deaths as recent as 5 years ago. Many soldiers lay below the mud, and many children, too.
And somewhere out there, could be anywhere in this beaten, backwater poorhouse of the dead, lie the remains of Buddy Bolden. “The blowingest man since Gabriel,” Jelly Roll Morton put it. According to Morton, Bolden would start blowing and the whole town would come running. Bolden was the genius giant of Storyville, yet not a disc of vinyl exists to pass on his sound for generations like ours. He died in a madhouse, and away they threw him, and there’ll be no finding him now.
FEMA trailers sit on the other side of the back fence. Water gathers under wild, unkempt trees, and no one watches over Bolden’s resting place. From the flowers and stuffed animals and other offerings, though, we can see that mourners still visit their loved ones, remember them amid the mashed weeds and soiled ribbons.
We came Sunday afternoon to pay our respects, nod towards Bolden in thanks and remembrance. Surrounded by the toppled signposts of past lives and the aftermath of water, we struggled for a direction to aim tribute. Instead, we wandered around softly, through what’s left of a burial ground for the quickly forgotten.
He held a $6 beer in one hand, a faraway look in his eye, the mournful tone in his voice deep as a thousand years. With those resigned words he moved on, the early evening blue of summer bathing all of us through the arena's wide windows.
This ain't right, we agreed. This is bullshit. You don't break a promise for dollar beers in New Orleans in June and get away with it.
As humidity settles in and brings tempers nose-to-nose with the brink, and most of life shrugs along in a sweaty crawl, blog time suffers in N.O.N. Yet, not unlike deepest winter in the North, summer in New Orleans does afford time and isolation for study and plotting. And so we'll recommit ourselves to the task, even if the heat threatens to commit us to a different, air-conditioned asylum.
What's been going on in the meantime, in no particular order....
Main man Ron Hitley of Hornets247.com and I attend the Hornets draft party at the Arena, a teal n' gold circus/viewing party for families and hardcore fans with 5 cans of food or 5 bucks.
Upon entry, we mill around in the empty stands, then make our way to the concession counter for the much advertised (and greedily discussed) dollar beers and food. A Hornets employee sees the lengthening line and tells us another counter is open down the way. When we get there, the women behind the counter are informing people that beer is six bucks, pointing to the menus as proof.
"It says it right here!" a man cries, gesturing wildly at one of the TV monitors. I have a flier in my hand backing this up, and check again to make sure I didn't imagine it.
"Not today," one of the women replies. I guess no one thought to inform the actual sellers of these beers that today was a special event. I mean, that's not a priority or anything, right? And if you think a piece of paper or some TV screen is going to change their minds, I bet I can tell you where you got your shoes.
Back at the next counter, we meet the "They lied..." gentleman and can't believe this is happening. Ron's a bigger Bees fan than I am, so he's amped just to be here, but I'm getting heated, hungry, and thirsty. I'm too impatient to wait while the other kids make their signs at the Make A Hornets Sign table, but if I wasn't, well, there'd be some magic-markered choice words for management.
We walk down to the tunnel for our tour of the locker rooms and inform all staff present that a potential riot situation is developing upstairs.
A half-hour later when we end the tour, this heinous abberation has been erased and the beer flows freely. Ron and I drink the watery stuff hand over fist, the Hornets steal Julian Wright with the 13th pick, and confetti falls on all 300 of us. We stagger out into the evening heat.
For years I've wondered what it would be like when the day came and went, how the end would feel, how I would handle the change. Today, the inevitable happened, and I bore silent witness to a passing era.
Tony Blair stepped down as UK Prime Minister, ending a decade in power and handing a flickering flame over to the grayer grasp of Gordon Brown. Retrospectives and a farewell tour played out in the shadow of Iraq, casting everything in anticlimax and bitterness, half-hearted qualifications of the central failure, instantly faded memories of successes that will never add up to a positive legacy.
Down here, I smiled to myself and thought back. Five years ago, I started something called Tony Blair Presents. My friend Edna Leshowitz and I ran a performance series in the basement of a M Shanghai Bistro in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a little over a year, bringing in friends of ours with reputations big and small to entertain whomever showed up. Why "Tony Blair?" everyone asked. Cause, we'd say, we're LOYAL. No matter how bad they were, no matter how wrong, we'd stick by our friends, to our own detriment, just like the-man-himself.
Around about the time that ended, I started dj'ing on East Village Radio as DJ Tony Blair, later DJ Toney Blare. From a booth on 1st avenue & 1st street, I brought in a lot of different musicians--xylophonists from Guinea, rappers from Harlem, flutists from France, even a pop group from England--and some of my poet and actor friends. My man RD and I read half of Waiting for Godot in there, and I dj'd while like 30 people watched cats freestyle on the sidewalk. We did it right there on the ave every week, slightly unhinged and ramshackle and blazed, two hours in a fishbowl, real street-level shit. Bagpipe players and homeless dudes did cameos and I balanced things as much as I could.
And the funniest thing was, half the people who came through there only knew me as "Tony." I'd pick up comp tickets left for Tony Blair, get lauded in Time Out New York as Toney Blare, and introduce myself like, "Hey, I'm Toney." Whenever something extraordinary happened to the PM, people would ask me what I thought, and I usually knew something cause I'd read the London Times and the Mirror (your real source should be Blairwatch and my man Quarsan) every week. But I swear to god, there were people I was damn good friends with, chilling on a weekly basis, who only knew me as Tony. It felt weird and subversive, heavy on the weird.
Mostly, people would ask what I was going to do when Tony was gone. I'd blow them off, say I didn't give a fuck, say I was gonna be DJ Vlad Putin, or some such comment. It's just an alias, after all, and as I started to distance myself from irony and the useless satire of so many war "critics," I translated the name as "a plush blast," or something to do with Ghostface Killah and horns.
But now he's done and I'm in New Orleans with a clean slate and a hip-hop show for the summer, buried in a student union basement but plugging onward. When the day finally came, I looked back at all that Tony/Toney shit for the first time, really considered things. And I know I came out a lot better than he did.
And will keep on being Toney Blare. Check us out every Friday morning at midnight-2am this summer, 91.5FM in New Orleans.
A full-fledged deluge breaks open as we drive down Judge Perez Highway in St. Bernard Parish on Independence Day. The ruins and re-starts turn into a watery gray blur. Middle-aged Man rides shotgun, Kim and Ron Hitley are in the back, and I warily drive the Windstar through the storm.
"Picture this times ten."
"Times a thousand."
"Man."
On this American Birthday Party, I fight against hydroplaning in the middle of a devastated landscape of strip malls and housing developments. While the Lower Ninth Ward gets most of the spotlight, St. Bernard grunts and hammers, climbs up from a hole left by 10' flood waters. Judge Perez, namesake of this road, was a segregationist ward boss, most of the parish is lower to middle class whites, and most of the houses are squat, ranch-style affairs. This is more like America, less like the New Orleans in the nation's mind's eye.
Perhaps that's why no one talks about it--it's too close to places where people think they're safe from government-supplied disaster.
Kim and I come out here once in awhile to see friends of ours who lost everything in the storm and still live in a FEMA trailer. They came out on-top in a way, though, parlaying their insurance and saved-up cash into a much bigger house on serious discount. Today's the first time they'll swim in their pool.
Though the rain isn't feeling sentimental. We all sit under the giant carport and down cans of beer, get wet from the spray of the storm, eye the clouds and the pool, back and forth.
The United States, 2007: lite beer in a ruined neighborhood, the levee in plain view, renovations at a holiday standstill, a deserted house next door.
Finally the rain dies down and our friend Carl, new owner of this mansion with a gutted first floor, jumps into his pool for his first swim. Right about now, he doesn't give a shit about the rain, or the Storm, or anybody else's problems. The pool is something new and great, and to hell with dark clouds or hesitation.
One by one, everyone takes a turn in the pool. The Pirate's there with his red contacts in and his wife, too, and a giant plant strapped to the roof of their car. Middle-aged Man and I are there, together like we were last year for the 4th in Astoria Park. Kim slides down the slide and lands on top of an inflatable whale, rides it like a champion. Hell, even non-swimmer Ron Hitley gets on a raft and paddles around. Carl's buddy, Trouble, is there with a woman and her son, who's 15 and smoking reds, straight-up, bra. And Anne Marie from Ulster, Carl's wife, finally gets to be Barbie in her mansion.
I can't always define this place, this time, this way of life in the early 21st century, in these plains of nightmare and resurrection.
But I did walk into the gutted garage, to use the little bathroom with no walls. And there was the Pirate, taking a dump. He gave a big laugh.
It ain't Norman Rockwell, but it sure is America, alright.
The barrier is almost gone now. Last week the bulldozers began to move and the dividers were spread wide enough for cars to pass between them. Now a large pit of sand takes up the intersection, with cones in the middle and two piles of dirt on either side of Magazine, so that for a little longer, the block is closed. The lake side of Melpomene was laid with a tarp, then filled in with more sand, and a proper Road Closed sign sits at the end facing Camp St.
I sat down there on a concrete slab and stared towards the river, a large pile of dirt blocking my view, the West Indians/Africans visible in their front yard, the normal drifters crossing the parking lot. As so often, every kind of cloud spread across the dusk, high and low and speaking of the ocean, and I heard faint shouting. One atop the other, the two billboards peeled further, decaying into a collage of bygone advertisements perhaps set up when the barrier first arose.
A white man in a tie rode by on a bicycle, then a black woman in tight jeans rode by on a bicycle, then a white girl on a moped crossed the barrier and parked. She entered the house next to the hoarders with their porch full of refuse and their junkyard dogs. As I chucked pebbles into the sand, a black man in a tank top and shorts walked up to other side of the barrier, a cell phone in his ear. He looked across at me but spoke into the phone, “Well, when you think you gonna be home, then?”
We wander through states of change all day long in this city, all of us. Some changes we notice, some we lament, some we applaud, a whole lot we never notice; each of us has our path and our position. When we come upon a change in the landscape, the distinctions might be: benign/malignant, positive/negative, due-to-the-storm/unrelated or only exacerbated-by-the-storm. Or, at least we hope there’s a distinction, any parcel of understanding, and realize its our job to search for an understanding, as citizens of a city undergoing intense change. When the future is wholly unknowable and you’re unmoored from so much of the past, every little corner holds potential clues.
Since we moved here, I felt a basic attraction to the barrier. Kim and I said it to each other right when we got here—we wanted to see that barrier stay. Instead of the choked throughway that is Magazine Street between Washington Avenue and Louisiana Avenue, we essentially have a long cul-de-sac. Along with the school across the street, its playground empty after 5pm, the neighborhood is almost always tranquil.
A block down from us, the barrier is a clearing, a gap in the world, where no cars can travel, where the weeds surround ancient brick walls and men with oddly-shaped heads sit under street lamps, a rusting RV squats in the mechanics’ parking lot, and the mechanics’ shed is painted gold, red, black, and green, with a palm tree as its logo.
Perhaps because the street is sunken, there’s a sense that you’re on an island or in a hole, caught in the traction of a secret, safe to light up or paint over or break things. It feels like the scene of an unsolved crime, or proof of a mistake that went uncorrected, and so what? The barrier predates the storm, was abandoned for its own reasons, and for a long time it felt ownerless, unhinged, and squalid, like a tropical Saturn or a lunar Lagos.
On our block, we’ve witnessed armed robbery and murder, bizarre forms of prostitution, and the general traffic and commerce of the neighborhood flophouse. Some people claim that the shadowy divide in the street caused the proliferation of shifty activity, including the chop shops and the squatters, as if this neighborhood was somehow upstanding before the barrier ruined everything.
That’s of course bullshit, despite the laments of people like the whiny prick next door, who waters his overstocked lawn two hours after a rainstorm and parks his Escalade next to the house he’s equipped with a marble front porch, from which the chirps of his two wiener dogs punctuate his grotesque, disgruntled, homeowner’s-rights fantasy-investment mansion.
Along with whatever other pathologies he harbors in his air-tight palace, there’s a pea of truth in his mattress: the division of this stretch of Magazine Street has blocked the all-important commercial development that has forcibly ambled downriver over the last decade, smiling robustly as the dive bars and furniture stores shut down, and only temporarily halted by the bursting of a water main and the collapse of two houses almost five years ago.
The consumptive joy-couture suckled by the wealthy along most of the street can’t travel any further with that goddamned barrier blocking its way, fucking shit, ok? There are hair salons, bistros, and property values at stake, alright? Shit, it’s just typical New Orleans that such a dumb thing could cost so much money….
By persisting, the barrier demonstrates all the reasons the city didn’t become a sultrier San Francisco a long time ago. Instead of taking advantage of our assets, we’ve allowed them to rot, and crime has sprung up, even after the projects were torn downand the problem was solved.
(Oh, and please ignore the swathe of deserted, pseudo-lofts along Annunciation, models for the great condos-to-come we read about (some apparently with bated breath). Don’t give second thought to the poor of the projects we shipped down river to drown in New Orleans East. No, catering to the leisure class, it just works out for the best, get fucking with it!)
We could’ve had more gelato joints; instead we have an old drunk limping past, not harming anyone, just boozing vacant-eyed through his own lonesome life, but certainly not “contributing,” not in the way Escalade conductor does. Maddening, uncooperative New Orleans, shooting itself in the foot—that’s the barrier to a lot of people.
Point taken. Proceed with normal traffic patterns.
And where do all these things go? Those abrasive hoarders will be ordered to dismantle, they’ll be found out and sanitized away, dogs and bile and kittens and piles of board and broken stereos along with them, to god knows where. Glorified slumlords like mine will buy more property, drive up rents, and then no more teenagers playing football and hip-hop in the street, no more new cars pulling into the chop shop, no more spooky fellows in front of the bookstore, no more stray dog in steady trot, balls still attached and swinging in the breeze. With the barrier open, the salon will flourish, a new coffee shop will open across the street, and our neighbor will have his latte. No one will even remember the barrier, and maybe someday all the dirt and dirty people will be gone for good.
That is progress. Increased tax revenue, fewer hookers screaming below our balcony (although the old orphanage on Race St. is hanging quite tough, dear neighbor). I only wonder what else goes with them. Maybe I overstate the barrier’s importance; maybe it’s romantic to think that danger and shadow and the illicit still have a place in this city, still contribute more than they steal, may even mean more than a well-designed lounge. I want us to squash the violence, the inequity, the idiocy, I really do. But I’d like to know what we’re getting in the trade.
How can the removal of the barrier help everyone, not just the designer sunglass-ed drivers of retail commerce and safety? When did those things take control of New Orleans? Who said that’s what we should all want? Why is the unprofitable expendable? Why is the weird and illogical now not a part of this city? Can we afford to lose any of it?
When I was down there last night, the dusk bathed the barrier in purple and gold. The battery on my camera went dead before I could capture those moments, so I just sat there on that concrete slab and let the evening play out in front of me, with its riders and callers and bums. Tonight we walked in muddy sand under a gray sky, the bulldozers asleep for the night but well positioned for tomorrow.
Two puppies, the spawn of the West Indians/Africans’ rough mutts, played in the dirt piles, tumbling over each other and barking at us. Kim said she thought the upper billboard carried a fairly new slogan, but I said, no, that couldn’t be. “Why would anyone have advertised here?” And if we walk down there tomorrow, more questions, more shifting sand, more signs to read, more change to ponder.
We know where we are when we are at the barrier, but tomorrow more of what was will be gone. I wonder where we’ll be then.
From 1998-1999, I lived at the corner of Napoleon Avenue and Freret Street, in a small studio apartment upstairs from a gay couple who owned the large house. Apparently, they panicked after the storm and attempted to raise the building 8 feet, setting off a chain of events that led to the house’s current state of vacant decay. Whenever I drive by that corner and see the empty trailer wedged in the backyard where once a dainty garden bloomed, the foundation of the house splitting, and the doors pried open to the elements, I lament the fate of those poor guys and my former home.
Because that was my apartment when Kim and I started dating, the spot holds an important place in my heart, as does all of Freret Street. That year we attended what must have been the 3rd Freret Street Festival, with Walter “Wolfman” Washington playing from the back of a Ryder truck and the two of us dancing among a modest crowd of neighborhood people. The stretch of Freret above Napoleon has a very Caribbean vibe to it, with old stucco buildings and some tile roofs, and, though it’s a central street uptown, I guess that part always seems like an island to me; sorta romantic, always sun-baked, self-contained.
This year we returned to find a festival with 3 stages, probably the best line-up of any of the free festivals in the city, and thousands of people filling those blocks. More importantly, Kim is now director of the new neighborhood center, so we’ll be up there a lot from now on. A double-wide shotgun, the center is close to finished, but not fully opened. There is a stage in the backyard, though, and a talent show went on most of the afternoon. Mardi Gras Indians, spoken word, and a loose funk band gave way to some R&B, some crunk, and some straight-up N.O. hip-hop.
Game Tight Records (that's a grown-over satellite dish behind them)
Monday brought the news of Rep. Bill Jefferson’s indictment on racketeering, obstruction of justice and money laundering charges, and with it another sad chapter in the story of old sins coming back to cripple the city’s recovery. Caught just before the storm with 90G’s stuffed in his freezer, Jefferson faces ouster from the House after giving up positions on the Trade, Ways & Means, and most recently the Small Business committees.
Think about what that means: instead of a senior representative in the House on three of the committees (hypothetically) most import to New Orleans, we get an impotent soon-to-be felon whose own family is implicated with him in a scheme to bribe Nigerian officials. Just when we could use maximum efforts in Washington, we get a soiled void.
What hurts is that the people voted him in last fall knowing full well that he faced just such a fate. Victorious by way of a long-established machine and an appeal to suburban conservatives, Jefferson represents the most needy district in the country as a pariah in his own ruling party. All we can hope for is his forced ouster, if hope is what you want to call it.
In New Orleans, music’s ubiquity always threatens to make it too accessible, and thus taken for granted. The epiphanies of great performances come too easy at times, and so their magnitude lessens and we miss gigs we should make, sure that we’ll catch the next one. Great musicians who do their thing end up not being enough because, even in the disarray of the current scene, that’s what New Orleans cats do—survive and blare.
At the same time, with the stakes so high today, a show that might’ve been great 10 years ago shifts into transcendence now when certain musicians, in the grip of those stakes, decide to take things further. And for complex reasons, it matters more. Many times in the 1990’s, I had my mind blown. Nowadays, when the sound is right, my mind focuses and tunes into line with my heart; I am reassured and given direction.
On Monday night, we stood in the Dragon’s Den and listened to Kidd Jordan play with the Rob Wagner trio, which features Hamid Drake, the great Chicago drummer. I’ve heard Kidd and Hamid play with different ensembles, mostly in New York, and so I’ve been telling Kim to get ready for weeks now. But Monday night was different.
The gig was the trio’s 2nd night in support of a new CD, which I hear is dope. Kidd Jordan played the Monday gig only. At times it felt like this was the first and last gig he’d ever play, like he had to get it all out on the canvas Hamid wove, and fuck everything else. Really and truly: Hamid Drake must be the greatest drummer alive and perhaps ever, and Kidd just turned and played right back at him and with him and people stood in a trance, sometimes broken by yelps of disbelief.
When free jazz hits me right, I am prone to laughter, which is not the norm in the often museum-like crowd at a lot of those shows. This time I didn’t need to worry about that, as other people got carried away. Kidd Jordan and Hamid Drake proved that sometimes a moment comes and will definitely pass and you make the art you have to in that space. From the get, you could see that Kidd was so glad to play a night with Hamid and that appreciation, that sudden shock and then work—that’s what I keep reminding myself to keep close.
Games played in New Orleans must suffer from more rain delays than almost anywhere else in the country. At this time of year, the skies behave in true tropical fashion, with a strong shower in the early evening that gives a brief respite from the humidity. So far we’ve had a mild spring, but the heat lurks, ready to slow things to a crawl.
Last night, we drove out to “The Shrine on Airline,” aka Zephyr Field, the minor league baseball stadium on Airline Highway, home to the New Orleans Zephyrs. Kim had coupons for $1 tickets for volunteers, courtesy of the United Way. Instead of the usual get-what-you-get cheap ticket, this put us in the first row just to the first base side of home plate.
I was pretty amped about this positioning, as the Zephyrs feature one Sandy Alomar Jr., the former All-Star catcher who, at 42, is on a quest to return to the Majors, this time with the Mets. From our prime seats, we could watch Sandy call the game, and peek into the dugout to check in on, among others, former Yankee Ricky Ledee and hot prospect Lastings Miledge.
Mostly, though, Sandy Alomar Jr. I mean, after a fairly illustrious career, why try to get back to the show one last time, especially when already the Mets sit in 1st place with an all-star catcher? Sandy’s chances are pretty slim, but there he was, doing the Bull Durham in Metairie.
Equipped with two beers, two dogs, and an order of nachos, we sat down for the beginning of the game vs. tonight’s opponent, the Salt Lake City Bees. After the bottom of the 1st began with two hits from the Z’s, the rain started and grew increasingly fierce, soaking the nachos and watering down the beer. We didn’t give up until the grounds crew, which included members of the crowd, announced a rain delay by dashing onto the field.
At the top of the bleachers, we watched the storm and ate our dogs. For some reason, the scoreboard showed an old clip of Sheriff Harry Lee marrying what appeared to be two mascots on the grass of Zephyr Field.
Harry Lee Loves Nutrias
The delay lasted about 40 minutes. When the game resumed, the Z’s stranded the two runners and the long 1st inning was over. In the 5th, though, they could not be denied. Things got nuts when Sandy took one deep for a 3-run homer, followed by one hit after another until Ledee knocked another 3-run homer.
Then two utterly ridiculous things happened: the Salt Lake pitcher attempted to attack the ump and was thrown out, along with the Bees’ manager. Then Kim reminded me that the homer run meant the first 100 people to the beer stand won a Miller Lite "foamer." I raced up there and took my place in the long line. An old feller came up and started telling the guy in front of me that he didn't "drink the stuff, I'm just getting it for Ledee's wife." And sure enough, each of us got a 10oz cup of beer, thanks to Ricky Ledee.
