Take Me Out to the Ballgame
June 22, 2009
We did it! Although our efforts weren’t broadcast, we sang the national anthem and “God Bless America” at the Red Sox game yesterday. The adrenaline rush was beyond description, and I am still basking in the memory of 35,000+ cheering fans.
The fact that they weren’t necessarily cheering for us is pretty much beside the point. Red Sox fans love to cheer, and they gave us everything they had. When we sang to them, we did our best to return the favor.
When I finally crashed last night, it was as if someone had dropped a brick on my head. I slept like a stone, but I’ve still been tired today. The truth is that I’ve spent most of the day in a state somewhere between coma and outright death.
Red Sox home games are rich with tradition and ritual, a lot of it musical. Since shortly after 9/11, for example, live performers have sung a verse of “God Bless America” at every game during the seventh inning stretch. Since 2002, fans have sung along with Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” before the bottom of the eighth inning. “Sweet Caroline,” in fact, has evolved into a sort of performance art piece where audience participation is necessary to complete the song. In some ways it reminded me of the audience participation material that has developed and evolved in midnight screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Baseball being what it is, of course, the antics at Fenway are a whole lot more wholesome.
But not necessarily more sanitary. The way vendors sell hot dogs in the stands, for example, was enough to turn my stomach. Here’s the deal: If you’re sitting in a middle of a row in the grandstands and you want a hot dog, the vendor takes the hot dog and bun and wraps a single cheap paper napkin around it. Both ends of the bun are completely uncovered. The vendor gives the hot dog and bun to the person at the end of the row who then passes it to the person beside him. And so it goes. Hand to hand to hand, until it reaches the customer. The customer then sends money back to the vendor, hand to hand to hand. Change, if any, then goes back to the customer, hand to hand to hand.
A young couple with two little boys sat at the end of our row. As we passed hot dogs and money back and forth, I said to her, “Isn’t it fortunate that all the people in in this row just washed and sanitized their hands.” The little boys looked puzzled. The young mother blanched.
The boys did not get vendor hot dogs, and neither did I. Make no mistake. If the Red Sox ask, we’ll go back to sing at Fenway Park again in a heartbeat, but if I want a hot dog I’ll go to the concession stand.
June 23, 2009 at 8:25 am
I didn’t enjoy the rest of the game and I am sure I was not alone. I would much rather have heard your quartet.
June 23, 2009 at 2:42 pm
As for me, I have never had the desire to face a major league pitcher’s fastball. A 90+ mph pitch is a deadly weapon.
June 28, 2009 at 7:34 pm
June 29, 2009 at 12:11 am
June 29, 2009 at 10:05 am
Anne, I think we probably sounded pretty much the same as we did on the radio except for the extra dose of adrenaline we got from the crowd.
In singing the National Anthem, we remember that the tune was a drinking song. Attempts to make it into something else or to wring soulful blue notes out of it are always doomed to failure.
Fortunately for singers of all persuasions, only the first verse is ever required. The other verses have the right number of syllables, but the stress pattern just doesn’t work with the music. You always end up, as they say, with the ac-CENT on THE wrong syl-LA-ble.