Juggling Monkeys

Imagine this scene. Two wild monkeys are struggling to balance themselves atop their unicycles while juggling machetes and chainsaws. As the camera draws back we see that the monkeys are performing this death defying stunt while perched on the top of a giant beach ball being held in the air by the trunk of a white elephant, himself reared up on his back legs attempting to surf a pipe wave in Ehukai Beach Park in Hawaii.

This is what has been going on inside my wife’s head for the past seven days. When I wrote my blog a week ago entitled “The Next 97 Days”, I couldn’t add the part about her planning and executing a 50^th birthday party for her sister because it was a surprise. Even though it was absolutely, positively the last thing she needed on her plate, the thought of someone else throwing the party without her was too much for her to bear. It was like waving a red blanket at a raging bull. No, if a party was going to be planned it would be Pam at the helm or nobody at the helm.

Of course, being Pam, it had to involve color coordinated decorations, properly arranged with a consistent theme… and cupcakes. She would insist on not one, or even two, but three different varieties of these delicious but labor intensive confections.

So, the morning of the big event I hear her down stairs in the kitchen rattling pots and pans, precariously close to meltdown status def-com 5, but what to do? The extent of my baking skills is limited to the consumption phase of the process. As a general rule, I have always held to the belief that injecting myself into the midst of a chaotic kitchen is one of the worst rookie mistakes of marriage, and is to be avoided at all cost. But, I could tell that the pressure and fatigue were catching up with her. So, I go downstairs and peek around the corner. She is franticly whipping up something with her high tech mixer, flour and confectionary sugar all over the place. Then it hit me. I am one hell of a dishwasher.

“Honey, how about I just wash up the pots and pans between courses here? Would that help?”

One of my better ideas.

Two and a half hours later she was done, the kitchen was spotless and I had even managed to help her put the filling in some of the cupcakes, a collaborative triumph of brains and brawn.

She then headed over to the venue to set everything up. I followed later with a chicken nugget tray from Chick-Fil-A, the only store bought item on the menu. When I arrived all hell was breaking loose, as people were showing up early and no one had showed up to help yet. I was plugged into this gaping manpower hole with barked commands from both my wife AND mother-in-law. (def-com 6.) Twenty minutes later this is what the place looked like:

Yep. My wife is amazing.

The Flying Squirrels

Tonight Pam and Kaitlin are taking me to a Flying Squirrels game for my birthday. We have seats on the lower level, first base side right behind the dugout. It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful night, in the 70’s. Can’t wait!

We will sample the unique cuisine of baseball. There will be ballpark hotdogs, giant soft pretzels, popcorn that comes in that familiar striped red box, and of course cotton candy. This year, Flying Squirrel fans will get to try a new locally brewed beer that we all got a chance to name…chin music. Then there’s dippin dots, that strange, otherworldly ice cream imitation that sounds and looks horrible but somehow works only at the ballpark. There will be those wonderful carnival barker guys who walk up and down the aisles hawking everything from peanuts to cold beer. There’s just about no place on earth I would rather be on a Friday night.

Minor league baseball may be the best entertainment value in America. First of all, at least on the Double-A level, the players are young and quite good. They hustle as if they have something to prove on every play, which they actually do. These guys don’t have the entitled swagger of their big league brethren. There’s not a lot of batting glove adjustments and long walks out of the batter’s box after every pitch. They are mostly 21 year olds with a dream and they play with a sort of unbridled energy, eager to impress. Because these games aren’t televised, the games are played at a must faster pace which is something MLB could learn from. These guys don’t take a lot of pitches. See ball, hit ball.

Then there’s the marketing department of the Flying Squirrels, a sort of Barnum & Bailey meets WWE. Every half inning features some zany madcap game featuring kids playing horse shoes with toilet seats or some such thing. Once every game a bunch of grounds crew guys run out in dresses and blond wigs to sweep the infield and advertise Molly Maids. It’s non-stop tom-foolery until the final out.

Five years ago when the Flying Squirrels replaced our beloved Braves, the name Flying Squirrels was something of an embarrassment and source of great derision. Of all the things to name a team from Richmond, Virginia, which hadn’t had an actual flying squirrel sighting maybe EVER. If I was going to name a team from Richmond I would have gone with something that its citizens could understand and appreciate..like the Monuments, or the Rebels, the Virginians, or even the Insufferable Old-Money Bluebloods. But the Flying Squirrels?? Well, this just proves how little I know about marketing. Somehow it caught on in a huge way and is now one of the most popular Minor League mascots in the business. “Nutsy” is the man, although if he ever showed up in my back yard he would feel the wrath of my BB gun.

There are a lot of things wrong in America at the moment, but thank God, minor league baseball isn’t one of them.