6/30/99
Softball: Zeitgeist and Sauce
Dear People,
As the nation approaches it's 223rd anniversary, I suppose that there are many of you who will be tempted to leave the immediate Bay Area in order to rusticate elsewhere with distant familial relations, as if such people had anything to offer you beside tawdry gossip and unnecessary memories of your pathetic youth and adolescence. Frankly, I think we can all agree that there are more appropriate ways to spend the 4th of July. Indeed, two years ago this week, I wrote the following:
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It is Friday afternoon and we are still SEVERAL commits short of the necessary quorum for this weekend's softball game. As the 4th approaches, I am reminded of the intense pressures that Jefferson, Adams and Franklin must have felt when they decided to pen that most momentous of definitive divorces, their very lives at stake as cunning little fish-and-chips eating British troops scampered throughout the Pennsylvania bush. These intrepid and indefatigable revolutionaries would have no doubt given anything to play an exciting game of softball, but stuck as they were in the 18th century, they had to settle for yeoman farming and really boring arguments about the nature of mercantilism. I think you see my point. Make that commit. Do it for the children. Do it now. Indeed, the line from Alexander Hamilton to Jackie Robinson to all of you is the very essence of the American experience....
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Well, it is now two years later, and obviously I am no longer the crass cynic that I was back in '97, when I was so willing to exploit seminal historical developments simply to galvanize the community into playing a game. Today, with over 130 dedicated athletes on the email list, such unseemly supplications clearly suggest the distant and turgid innocence of the mid 1990s, when we as a softball playing people were still a motley handful of embittered academics, drug store cowboys and dilusional rogues. Of course, the underlying values of Madisonian athletics remain, and that does not fade simply because most of us have since become jaded internet billionaires.
Therefore, there will be a game this Sunday, July 4th, at 11AM at our beloved Cordonices Park, IF I get enough commits by this Friday Noon. In addition, because I delight in titillating you with ever varying configurations of the softball-playing experience, I would like to announce that there will be a pot luck barbecue immediately after the game, IF at least a couple people agree to supply a grill w/ coal (please let me know if you can, ASAP). Everyone who plans to come should bring their own meat and booze, and inform me of their proposed communal contribution in order to assure culinary balance. I suggest one of the necessities, such as buckets of ice, paper plates and utensils, sodas, salads, brownies, veggies, or perhaps a pan-seared game-hen with braised tapioca chutney....Raymond
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