Crowd Surfing and Pushups
Those who usually bloviate about progressives and neo-conservatives have been blathering up a storm over the email wa-a-arrrrs about the state of collegiate football. Last night everybody was “routing” for MooU (sorry Mark but that was a wonderful typo!), who played Notre Dame at Spartan Stadium. According to Karen the entire field was a “giant Slip ‘n’ Slide”. I didn’t watch the game and I was oblivious to the email conversation until this morning.
MooU lost. The conversation went on to a slightly different track when the Marquis said, “Oh well ND, ESPN & ABC won.” I think it was about that point — in the morning — that I joined the conversation but by then The Marquis was absent, probably still getting his beauty sleep. Karen and I raged on for a while about how commercialism and the proliferation of talking heads has spoiled the game and made it impossible for people to watch the half-time show.
I haven’t been to a college football game since the Jurassic Age but back then, we used to make the trip to The Planet Ann Arbor once a year to see a UM game. The bank Grandroobly worked for bought season tickets every year and interested employees took turns using them. It was a blast! We’d leave Siberia right after school on Friday, eat dinner at the Sugar Bowl in Gaylord and arrive at Chez Regenstreif late in the evening. That was back in the days when Chez Regenstreif was located on Crest St., right around the corner from Slauson Middle School. Saturday morning was donuts and cider and stuff and Pooh and I would walk downtown and window shop in all the “hippie stores,” the likes of which we certainly didn’t have in Siberia!
Grandroobly and The Commander had the bank tickets and I’m not sure where they sat. The rest of us, kids and Bubs or whoever, would literally walk right up to a ticket booth and *buy* our tickets in the end zone for some small amount of money. Do they even still have ticket booths at the big house? I never could exactly figure out what was going on down on the field but I was willing to yell and scream and jump around if everyone else was. But it was really fun to watch the cheerleaders — all male — jump on trampolines and do fancy gymnastics. And people would get passed up to the top of the stadium. Valdemort calls that a pushup. Apparently now there is also crowd surfing, which I is just passing someone *around* in the crowd. See comments. (She says they do that at rock concerts too, which would be one more reason I don’t enjoy them, the main reason being interminably long drum solos, but that’s a topic for a whole ‘nother entry.) Small planes would lazily buzz the stadium trailing messages behind them.
Yes, we watched the marching band! I was *in* the Sault High marching band from grade 7 on up, so that was fascinating. And once on band day at the UM (which my high school *never* went to while I was in attendance, grrr), I ran into a kid I had met at Interlochen!
I think one of my favorite parts of our football weekends was walking back to Chez Regenstreif from the stadium on sunny fall afternoons. We would always stop at Allmendinger Park and spin around on the merry-go-round. It wasn’t a fancy merry-go-round with horses, just one of those playground things, where everybody would get on and one person would run to get the thing spinning, then jump on. I was usually the runner person, I think. I *loved* those things and the only one I knew of anywhere near Siberia was in the Brimley State Park, which cost *money* to go into so we certainly didn’t get *there* very often. 😉
It has been a football weekend and today the GG went down to see a Lions game. That was okay with me, I was buried in homework assignments. At least he did not come home wearing a dog poop hat.
September 24th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
I’m not sure what the “push-ups” are, but the “crowd surfing” is the act of passing co-eds (i.e., females) up & down the Student Section (i.e., “The Corner Blitz” at MooU).
I remember the “merry-go-rounds” from my childhood – there were a teeny one (about 3-people sized) and a bigger one (maybe 7 or 10??) at the park down by the river in E-ville. Use-ta get pretty dizzy on those!! ‘Course, thanks to the d**n lawyers, all those types of playground equipment have been removed…
Er, “dog poop hat”? He just needs to come here if he wants the “Real Thang”.
September 25th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Push-ups: Everytime we score a touchdown, a bunch of random students get picked up by their neighbors and pushed up and down for each point scored. They aren’t passed up and down the stands as they are during crowd surfing.
Sorry if the earlier e-mails didn’t make much sense; I was only partially conscious at that point still. (My circadian clock is a little screwy, as you can tell! It’ll fix itself once our “Seven Game Stretch” is over.
September 25th, 2006 at 1:40 am
Also: dog poop hat? What’s this now?
We have a few ‘hippie stores’ in town, but not nearly as many as Ann Arbor, which is one thing I’ve never liked about the downtown area. The shop that sells hookahs is kind of fun to walk around because it sells some really weird odds and ends, but I’ve never bought anything there. North of Grand River, between the residential section and the major downtown stores, there are a few other fun, random little shops. It’s enjoyable to wander around during normal class hours once I’ve dropped off my band uniform to the cleaners, because there aren’t so many people around. However, my favorite walks here happen at night when I can wander around campus and the only others around are the runners and people walking home from late-night labs.
The restaurant scene, however, is diversifying. And by diversifying I mean we’re getting all sorts of Mexican restaurants, some of which I’ve heard of, and others I haven’t. The Taco Bell moved across the street from its former location, Panchero’s is still rockin’, and we’ve added Qdoba (Union), Big Ten Burrito, and Chipotle.
Note that they’re all within a half-mile of each other!
September 25th, 2006 at 5:05 am
Those “hippie” stores were *way* back in the day. I really don’t go downtown much these days, can’t stand crowds, but nowadays I think downtown A2 is more “upscale” in general, albeit in a student-y kind of way. Of course, there’s always Urban Outfitters, etc. I’ve sure done my time floating around that place!
Back *in* the day, a little later in life than those trips to A2 for football games, I knew the character — and he *was* a character — that owned the White Monkey head shop in EL. I could probably remember his name if I really tried, but I wouldn’t post it. We knew him as Ozone Bob, who also owned a head shop in Sibera — the Blue Earth Trading Company. Dirtiest toilet I’ve ever seen. Well, almost the dirtiest.
One time he was driving his truck full of paraphenalia up to Siberia. He crossed the Mackinac Bridge and then apparently *forgot* that he had crossed the bridge. High? Prob’ly. So he went ahead and crossed the International Bridge. He woke up pretty well when the Canadian customs guy asked him if he had anything to declare. Hell yes! “I’ve got a truck full of paraphenalia. I don’t wanna go to Canada.” If the story is actually true, they turned him around and sent him back across the bridge.
Those stores are long gone and Ozone Bob is dead.
September 25th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
And nowadays some officious official on the U.S. side would tell Ozone Bob that he needed his birth certificate to prove he was a U.S. Citizen!
Yeah, terrorist that I am, I forgot my birth certificate when I took the scenic route back from New York. The nice man (aka O.O.) said that my driver’s license didn’t prove my citizenship, nor would a Social Security Card.
Things that I bit down on my tongue to keep from saying out loud:
1. And a birth certificate doesn’t show the Al-Quaeda training camp I could have attended anytime since birth!
2. Go ahead and fingerprint me – my prints are already on file with the FBI.
a. From the years when I worked as a Federal Contractor with a Secret Clearance.
b. At least twice in the last five years to show that I can teach b/c I have no record of child molestation.
3. Can I just turn around now, so I can make it back to the Point Pelee motel, and get up early to watch all the terrorist birds and butterflies sneaking across national border?
September 25th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
I’ve been nervous about the Canadian border ever since that time we went over there to the Canadian lock with you guys and they gave us an awful time because our kids didn’t have birth certificates. But after a couple of really smooth experiences this summer, I’m convinced that it’s something to do with how the GG approaches “authority” figures in general.
Mouse and I went over there for about an hour or so to go to a yarn shop. Quite a disappointment and we felt sorry for it. 😥 Absolutely no problem getting *in* to Canada without showing *any* ID. Coming back, I had our licenses held out to the guy and this is how it went:
Customs guy: Where are you ladies from?
Me: Ann Arbor MI
Customs guy: What are you doing all the way up here?
Me: We’re staying at our cabin on the Upper St. Mary’s River for a couple weeks.
Customs guy: Where is that?
Me: Upper St. Mary’s River near Birch Pt.
Customs guy: Oh, I know where that is.
He asked a couple more random little questions about how long we’d been in Canada and didn’t even really ask if we had anything to declare. 😯 And never did look at our licenses. But those can really be nasty and I sympathize.
Re: Ozone Bob. Even though he *told* that story, I dunno how true it really was. But life is often stranger than fiction and my friend Kathie Mullin used to always forget whether we’d crossed Mackinac Bridge when we went down to Boyne to ski. And certainly nobody was smokin’ pot in Doc Mullin’s van 😉
September 26th, 2006 at 2:01 am
You want to hear about Mexican food? Talk to me.