Take me out with the crowd...

"So what do you want for your birthday?" I was asked.

"I don’t know," I said…

Problem was, I knew. I knew.

I wanted a treat … a bomb pop … to write like Walt Whitman … to be blonde … to actually have blue eyes … to be six foot one … something that I had wanted all of the these years … something that since I was a kid I could never have or never be… maybe just to run pain free, to hide in tall grass again, to open my arms to a sunrise, to hug my grandmother … to feel and taste and hold something beyond cool, beyond, yummy, beyond sunny, beyond belonging.

Birthdays are funny. I honestly enjoy other people’s birthdays more than I have ever liked my own. I think mainly because I like celebrating my friends and family and whupping up as much whoop as I can muster for them, but I scarcely feel celebrated enough myself. Short of seeing neon signs every quarter block declaring “Happy Birthday” to me and having every dog I know howl out the birthday tune, quite frankly I will always feel undercelebrated. Not that I feel like I am this oh great one worthy of so much pomp and fan fare. I just love, I mean I really crave a super duper celebration.

So when the 22nd of May each year rolls around, I start to get apprehensive… that maybe again at birthday time I am going to be amongst something quiet, something humble, something however sincere, is just like me -- and just not what I really want: raucous, pink, bright green, frosting filled, people people people, people who don’t know each other, but people who want to … people who don’t know me, but people who long to … rockstar guitars, fancy cars, and periodic celebrations of life!

This year, I got up and went for a birthday run in a birthday outfit from my dear husband and when I was taking my birthday shower before I opened my birthday cards I decided to take this birthday celebration into my own birthday hands --- are you getting the idea of how many times I want to hear the word “birthday” on my birthday? Take note for next year, friends! So, yeah, when I was drying off in my birthday suit, I told Russ that for my birthday I wanted to go to a baseball game. Yay! A birthday baseball game! What could be better? What could capture all of the things that I love and long for more than a baseball game? Sun, fans, dudes, grass and sand, leather balls and wooden bats, random and focused cheering, raucousness and singing for no reason, mascots with absurd heads, everyone trying to act young, everyone celebrating and playing what is really just a kid’s game.

Goddamn, what makes me love baseball so much? America’s pastime is ever my pastime too. I so fondly remember falling asleep on summer nights listening to the “fan radio” – WFAN AM 660 in NY, learning how to keep a scorecard, going to Cooperstown with my dad (and boycotting the year of the strike)…

One year when I was little (before I was old enough to play girls’ softball), my brother, our neighbor friend Geoff, and I played on the same Little League team together, coached by our dads. We were the Expos and we were no more successful than our Major League namesake of the 1980’s. Heck, I don’t even think I had a hit. The best I managed to muster were some fierce foul balls down the third base line. Man, did I keep the third base coach on his toes, though… But I loved putting on that polyester red, white and blue uniform, the high split baseball oversocks over my sand-stained tube socks… cramming a helmet on my head and taking my licks. Speaking of licks, it was customary in our town for the winning team’s coach to treat his players to ice cream at the Hidey-Ho. We Expos had gone all year without a trip to the Hidey-Ho. During the last game of the season, we were winning, actually winning! We kids got so excited and started whispering to each other then eventually shouting amongst ourselves, “We’re going to the Hidey-Ho! We’re going to the Hidey-Ho!” Well, something happened… I can’t even remember what it was, but we ended up losing or tying or some result that wasn’t technically Hidey-Ho worthy. When the final out was made, before we could hang our collective little heads, our dads told us that they would take us to the Hidey-Ho anyway because we came so close. Oh yeah!!!! That’s a celebration! That’s baseball! “We’re going to the Hidey-Ho! We’re going to the Hidey-Ho!” We went to the Hidey-Ho.

I love baseball. Baseball gets in my fiber. Did you know that the first night baseball game in history was played on May 24th, 1935 in Cincinnati, OH at Crosley Field? See: I was born to love this game! Another marvelous quality about the game of baseball is that there is no time clock, but players ask for “time out.” How great is that? And each game opens with our nation’s National Anthem. And me, I love belting it out like no one is listening – because no one is. Right?

Towards the end of a baseball game there is mandatory stretching: the 7th inning stretch. How great is that? Very. My buddy Ryan and I went to a Padres game in San Diego at the Litter Box (you know, Petco Park) that lasted 17 innings and midway through the 14th, we were all directed to perform a 14th inning stretch and sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” all over again. “I don’t care if I never get back” – what’s that supposed to mean? Who cares? How fun is it to sing like you know what you’re talking about, though? The song talks about being taken out, celebrating with a crowd, rooting, buying something sweet and salty, and really not worrying about anything but being out at the old ball game, living in the moment of revelry!

The first Major League baseball game that I ever went to was with my father and my friend Linda. I was 13, I think, because it was in the summer of 1987. Dad insisted that we do something educational during the day before the night game at Shea, so he took us to Sagamore Hill, Teddy Roosevelt’s house. I’m not sure how much we got out of that, but now it is funny for me to think about that because Teddy is my favorite racing president mascot at Nationals Stadium. But anyway, when we got to Shea, and I had my first look at that HUGE green field – the stage – and the players that I watched almost everyday on TV in real life: Gary Carter, Darryl Strawberry, Lenny Dykstra… how fantastic! What a celebration! I wore my crummy painted-on Mets shirt and big Christmas ball sized Mets logo earrings with pride that day and cheered myself hoarse when my favorite, #8, the catcher, Gary Carter hit a home run and the big apple lit up and popped out of the magic hat in right field. Hells yeah!

So on this May 24th, for my 35th birthday, Russ and I went to a Nats-O’s game. We took the train there, crammed amongst many other fans clad in Nats Red and Orioles Orange. I wore my Mets hat (the same smelly one that I wore when I was a kid) and Russ wore his “dyed in the wool” Nationals hat – the one with the cursive “W” that my buddy Phil confuses with the Wegmans grocery store symbol: “I can’t believe all of the Wegmans fans around here… I mean it's a great place to shop, but people really rally around their grocery store!" Silly Phil! So yeah, we loaded up on the train and trundled to the Navy Yard stop on the green line to Nationals Ball Park. The few blocks from the metro stop to the ball park remind me of the neighborhood around Safeco Field in Seattle and Tropicana Field in Tampa: teeming with perpetually festive hawkers of hot dogs, kettle corn, memorabilia and beer. What’s not to love?! It was a super sensation just mingling among the throng of people, ambling down the street to the ball park to partake of a little pastime, to revel in the celebration that is baseball! Yippie!

When we first got inside, we ended up circumnavigating the ballpark to find the beer we wanted; after the first we weren’t going to be particular, but we wanted the first to be my favorite summer beer: Shock Top! Mmmmmn Mmmeh!
To start the game off, the Orioles fans desecrated the National Anthem by shouting out “O SAY during the “O say does that star spangled banner yet wave…” part. In the words of my mother, “I was none too pleased about that!” Last week when my Mom and Dad were in town, I took them to the American History museum to see the original Old Glory, the one that bravely waved over top of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. (Sheesh, if anyone should respect the Star Spangled Banner it should be Baltimoreans being that Fort McHenry was in their harbor, those bastards…!). Anyway, the newly restored Old Glory in the Smithsonian is impressive and awe-inspiring. Before I saw it for myself, I had never really realized just how big it was. It was so big that the only place that the little old lady who originally sewed it could work on it was a brewery floor. Now that’s something more to celebrate – proof that our flag was born out of celebration; there was always a party going on upstairs: “O’er the land of the free… and the home… of the… brave!”

Dad was particularly struck by – or at least he felt like pointing out – the use of apostrophe (a declarative “O”,” for those unfamiliar with grammar jargon). As in “O say can you see… “ and “O Say does that …” or in Whitman’s “O Captain my Captain!” To me, the apostrophe signifies pride and exclamation to no one and everyone in particular. Thus our national anthem is a celebratory song for the masses.

So yeah, the Orioles fans desecrated the national anthem. That’s all right, we let them party along anyway. There was a particularly annoying fan seated behind us, though. He was a 20-30 yr old man-boy who was at the game with his Nationals fan dad. He obnoxiously felt like he had to school his own father in everything from the nuances of the game to how to hold his beer. Honestly, Boy! Well, late in the game, when the Nats had a potential rally working, I pulled out my green St Patrick’s Day Miller Lite Nats hat and put it over my Mets hat and Russ turned his ball cap inside out in rally style. The rally caps worked! Adam Dunn did it again. He hit a grand slam… the stadium exploded! And the snipperdyjibbit behind us had to take a seat and stuff it. Woo-hoo! Russ and I about lost our voices on that one and high-fived everyone around us. The Natty Nats actually held on to win the game too. Woo-hoo! We left the ballpark in celebration with the rest of the fans and enjoyed a packed train ride home, celebrating my birthday with no one and everyone in particular. As Tim McCarver, former Mets announcer and Cardinal’s catcher said “O Baby I love it!”

Maybe when I am older, I might have a future in baseball… as a play-by-play announcer, a beer hawker, or just a big-head wearing mascot/dancing fool.