 Champs |
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My weekend in New Orleans was one to remember. My sister and I arrived Saturday morning and immediately hit the streets with my parents, enjoying a few cocktails and coconut shrimp at the Red Fish Grille. My sister and I headed to a tailgating party on a balcony in the Quarter and had a few more drinks and some snacks, carefully avoiding the boudin balls. I briefly met up with my friend Reid, who had flown in from Seattle, at the Royal Sonesta, and then we headed out for dinner at the Gumbo Shop where I ordered shrimp creole and two sides of maque choux because one was clearly not enough.  Sunday morning was the beginning of game day. My dad and I headed out to Cafe au Lait, where he suffered a temporary lapse of sanity and ordered what basically amounted to a meat lovers omelet for us to share, and I was too touched by his generosity the entire weekend to speak up. We walked down Royal Street to Le Madeleine to buy a bagel for my sister, but they apparently don't sell bagels, so we got her a bran muffin. We stopped in a candy shop so I could get a praline. I have to say that the area around the Cathedral is one of my favorites in New Orleans. I love looking at the art and the mimes and the face painters and the clowns and the fortune tellers and the musicians. My sister went on a long, long, long, long run to Audubon Park, running up St. Charles and reading Traveling Mercies all day, which a friend of hers had the good sense to give her for Christmas. Needless to say, she loves it and is experiencing the wonder that is reading Anne Lamott for the first time. My parents both went to the hotel gym to work out, because they are maniacs, and they had to be really sneaky about getting in because the gym was on the same floor as the team's rooms. (The entire hotel, because the team was staying there, was basically a mob scene the entire weekend. The lobby was at times as crowded as Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras.) Clearly, I was not going to be working out, so I set off for the Quarter and went back to Le Madeleine for a lemonade and a blueberry muffin. I sat in the sun in Jackson Square and enjoyed my snack and spent some time lollygagging through the streets and browsing through the shops. I recalled that it was exactly two years ago that I enjoyed another fun New Orleans weekend.  Soon it was time to get ready for the game. Everyone was kind of having trouble communicating coherently, I think. My parents and I hauled our asses to the Superdome in the crushing crowd, and Mom and I parted ways from Dad to find our seats in a very red end zone.  My dad went off to find my brothers in their 50 yard line seats, my sister walked over from her seats behind our band to say hello, I found Reid in the the other end zone with my binoculars by spotting the tacky gold shirt we'd bought at Walgreens a few days earlier, and I waved my purple boa at him so he could spot me. How did people live, I wonder, without cell phones? Anyway, I made myself comfortable with my strawberry daiquiri and waited for the game to start, and when it did, I proceeded to be nervous for the next 3.5 hours or so.   It was all very nerve-wracking, and I wasn't at all convinced that someone wasn't going to try to blow up the Superdome, and when actual rockets went off during "the rockets red glare," I basically plotzed. But all was well. I was mildly frantic because I forgot my trusty anti-bacterial hand lotion, and when my mom pulled some wet wipes out of her purse, I sighed in huge relief. (The germs and I are not getting along so well lately.) The game was stressful, exciting, and unbelievable. The players were all going balls out bordering on careless and desperate, and the penalties proved it. We sat there for the final few minutes all looking a little green, like, is this really happening? Surely this taking the knee thing is going to somehow go wrong and they're going to get the ball and score and we're going to go into overtime and then they're going to score and win. But they didn't. We did.   And even though it was just a stupid football game, I could not help but feel the excitement in the air. It took forever for the fans to finally leave, and we somehow found my dad and brother, and the walk back to the hotel was a crowded lovefest. We saw people we knew and everyone would just run to catch each other and embrace. Tiger music blasted from stereos, the tops of buildings were lit up in purple and gold, and people were dancing in the streets. My therapist and I embraced as she confided that she bought tickets for her and her son on ebay (where they were going for thousands of dollars) and vowed never to tell her husband how much money she spent. My dad saw a former governor's great-grandson and they walked with their arms around each other's shoulders. My mom held my dad's hand and they whispered to each other while I pranced behind them taking it all in. I met up with Reid and his friend outside our hotel and we went out in the Quarter for a little while because he could not leave town without having a hand grenade. I went back up to the room at about 2 a.m. and everyone was still awake watching Sports Center. After a weekend with weather so warm and sunny and perfect that it was bordering on the obscene, we woke up on Monday morning to drizzly, foggy cold. My sister and I stopped at Bayou Bagelry and took the Airline home because I-10 was absolutely snails. We listened to Rufus Wainwright and she told me how when she was a little girl, she would pray every season that we would win the national championship, and she thought it would be really sad if she died without that happening. And she said that even though obviously she does not feel such a sense of urgency about it now, it made me smile to think that this dream she had as a child and an idealistic Tiger fanatic had come true. And my dad, well, we might never be able to scrape my dad off the ceiling. I got home and greeted my animals. The dogs were ecstatic and the cats were visibly fatter after being free-fed for three days. I put on some warm pajamas, threw my clothes bathed in that unique New Orleans party gravy odor into the washing machine on hot, made some macaroni and cheese, watched the reaction to Roman's death on Days of Our Lives, watched Ebert and Roeper's Top Ten film lists (and was pleased to see In America on both lists and at the top of Roeper's), and passed out on the couch for several hours before going out for some shrimp and corn soup and coming home to a hot bath and my new Entertainment Weekly. Notwithstanding the fact that it's just a game, this night, this weekend, it really wasn't just a game. It was an excuse for my mom to wear purple suede. It was fathers and sons and mothers and daughters and brothers and sisters and friends all gathering in a city that's alternately filthy and whimsical and walking through the streets together en masse and making a memory. To some, the game and the win mean more than to others, but to everyone, I think, the memory means a whole fucking lot. The memory is what matters.  About this time in ...get notified.
© Copyright 2004 elb |
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