Grand Time at the Ol' Gridiron (2009)

 Originally published as a Facebook Note September 26, 2009.

Kingston Stadium (source: tourismcedarrapids.com)

 

High school football on Friday night is a hugely popular tradition in much of America, so hugely popular that it gets along fine without me, which is fine with both of us. However, recently Friday night lights in Cedar Rapids have shown on Robbie and the Warriors, a.k.a. the Washington High School Marching Band. So off we trundled on a fair evening last night, with our Japanese visitors in tow: Teppei from Waseda U. and Nuri from Nagoya U. They were in for a dose of American culture, and they got it. "Exciting," said Nuri. Words hardly do justice to their responses, though. Teppei's English is pretty good, but he's most expressive with his face and variety of vocal noises... think someone with the facial plasticity of Susan Young and the emotiveness of Ron Santo... and every bonecrunching tackle or trip to the concessions stands got a volume of expression. This kid should be in clubs.

To cut to the chase, the highlights of the evening:

1.  Washington's band did the halftime show and looked and sounded good. Besides their elaborate routine, they played pep tunes at various intervals, and the school fight song whenever something major happened, which turned out to be a lot. Most charmingly, they played an John Cage-like discordant yawp when the Warriors kicked off.
2.  In the third quarter, sitting behind the band as we were, we were treated to a close-up of "trombone suicides," a series of choreographed swings by these instrumentalists. They were impressively swinging about, and from one moment to the next someone's trombone would be where someone else's head had been a moment later. They kept this up for awhile. Then they started making mistakes, which looked painful for the girl who got two trombones to the head simultaneously.
3.  We were upwind from the cheerleaders, but that was OK because I'd heard their offerings at an earlier game. Those whose experience with hearing cheers dates from the 1970s, as mine until recently did, might imagine that modern technology has improved their quality. However, in a world with better phones, allergy medications, and bicycle helmets, cheers seem to have resisted improvement and any innovation suggests that the genre was pretty tapped out years ago. Anyone who's heard the Warriors' "color cheer" knows what I'm talking about... perhaps the silliest thing any human being has ever uttered. When I was in high school I yearned to be popular, but by now I've come to realize the cost is unbearably high.
4. A petty theft was foiled. I saw someone's mom, laden with concessions, drop a box of candy. As I was pointing it out to her, a young boy grabbed the candy and ran off. She, undaunted (what does that feel like, I wonder?) pursued and retrieved the candy.
5.  Another would-be theft was thwarted. As someone's dad was reaching over several people to hand some money to his daughter for concessions, the five-dollar bill was nearly stolen by a 50-year-old college professor, in the guise of passing it from father to daughter. The professor, who claims to be the advisor to Political Science Club and personal friend of George Washington, was exposed by the dauntless dad as the criminal mastermind Joey Five Dollars, who only, as the Anti-Federalist writer Brutus wrote, "only wanted an opportunity to perpetrate these enormities without restraint." Fortunately, our short-armed friend leapt up, snatched the bill back from the startled professor, and leaned way over in order to get it to daughter with no further incident. Attempts by the academic to explain his intervention were ignored because the father had already returned to his earlier activity of commenting loudly on everything else going on.
6. Ellen Pelzer of Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse, and a band mom (of the trombonist Henson Pelzer, who escaped the trombone suicides without incident), stopped by to talk to us and share news of her family and the coffeehouse. I enjoyed talking to her, even though I was still feeling like criminal pariah scum. I also saw Derek Buckaloo and John Lemos at the game, which should be enough to brighten anyone's evening.

There was an actual game. Washington's crosstown rival, Kennedy High School, was playing without their big kahuna, who last week suffered multiple breaks, tears, pulls and bursts, as will often happen in football. They gamely hung in through most of the first half anyway, but Washington eventually wore them down and won by a big number to a small number.