THIS WAS THE VIEW of the 400 level at Citizens Bank Park Saturday during the 7th inning of the Phillies loss to the Washington Nationals. There was more than one prayer offered up by Phillies fans yesterday. And you know that today will be no different. At the end of two innings the Phillies lead the Nationals 1-0. Meanwhile, in New York the Marlins are beating the Mets 7-1. YES!
I WAS STANDING IN A BAR on the 200 block of Market Street Friday night basking in the glow of a victory about to happen. After Ryan Howard's homer put the Phillies up 6-0 in the bottom of the seventh I exchanged high fives with kids less than half my age and I saw the joy in their eyes. They had never lived through this before. For them, the 1993 Phillies World Series is a distant childhood memory. The 1980 championship team is pre history. Standing in a bar cheering your team to a pennant, well sir, this was the first time for all of them.
Then Phillies reality shivered their timers. With two outs and the bases loaded Charlie Manuel decided to allow Cole Hamels to bat. You could feel the scrotums tightening throughout the room. If a six run lead isn't enough to hand the bullpen in the eighth inning, what is? If the Phillies were so concerned about Hamels injured arm, why would he be allowed to pitch more innings than he's pitched since he returned to the starting rotation? What was Charlie Manuel thinking!
The young men around me watching the TV began to disperse nervously, sensing the disaster every Phillies fan has grown dread iafter seemingly innocuous decisions -- allowing Greg Luzinski to field in the 9th inning in the 1977 Phillies-Dodgers playoff game three leaps to mind. These kids have not known the thrill of victory. They are the walking wounded just like every Phillies fan.
Hamel, of course, struck out to end the inning. In the top of the eighth Hamel gave up a flukey double. And the Cowardly Lion in the heart of ever Phillies fan began chanting, "I do believe. I do believe. I do, I do, I do believe." And then. . .VIOLA! No disaster. Handsome Hamels punched out the last Washington National batter. The bullpen pitched a worry-free ninth inning and the Phightin's were in sole possession of first place. Sing Hallelujah, come on, get happy.
Could this be the year? Have we suffered enough? Have we earned parole from purgatory?
I write this minutes before I head down to the ballpark for a nationally televised game that may mean everything, as has ever game these last two weeks. I'm not nervous. I feel strangely calm. I feel loose, like the Phillies. At long last I see the glass half full, plus one.
Continue reading "Tickle me Elmo. Is this really happening?" »
THURSDAY WAS A HOT DAY IN AUGUST. Unfortunately, it was the last Thursday in the driest September we've sweated through in years. My friend and former Inquirer colleague Tony Wood, who writes about weather patterns, wrote a story last week predicting that this fall is shaping up to be the most spectaular display of autumn foliage in many years all because of such a hot dry September.
SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS are racists. They believe what they believe and they rarely express their beliefs in spoken words, at least not in front of me. When they do speak they make little jokes to make my "liberal" opinions appear ridiculous before they reveal their own. They aren't proud to be racists; in their hearts they know that they are standing on the wrong side of history. But they have a right to their point of view and I can sense in them a smoldering anger that they're not "allowed" to say what they really think. Face it, anyone who proudly declares to be a racist may as well be wearing a swastika or selling bean pies on a traffic island.
ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO I made up my mind to read the Bible from cover to cover. I'm still working on it. My motivation was and is sincere and prosaic: every educated person should have read the Bible, a book so famous its very name means book. During those 20 years I have come to understand that the Bible takes an eternity to read and a lifetime to understand. Consider the source.
Continue reading "Bible stories: Another abusive drunk father" »
FOR SOME REASON this photo reminds me of a certain blonde long-haired general leading the 7th Cavalry at the very moment that Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the rest of the Souix forwards swallowed him alive. This is a moment late in the second half of a rugby match at South Jersey Rugby Club's pitch in Cherry Hill, N.J. Saturday afternoon. South Jersey, in green, is pushed within yards of their goal line in a set scrum they have won but lost against Brandywine (Pa.) Rugby Club.
I'M REALLY GETTING TO BE A FAN of this Brandywine Rugby Club, which in the past couple of seasons I have watched defeat some of the best clubs in the Eastern Pennsylvania Rugby Union. Maybe it's because Brandywine is coached by George Betzler, my gunney for many years at Whitemarsh, and later Philadelphia-Whitemarsh RFC.
DID YOU WATCH PRESIDENT BUSH'S address to the nation about the war in Iraq? In what alternate universe does this man reside? He's like the leader of the Bizarro Superman free world. Hello means goodbye, black means white, ignorance means strength. Consider how many errors of fact or cosmic reality the president offered the the first paragraph of his speech:
IF KENN KWEDER ISN'T the hardest working man in Philadelphia rock n' roll show bidness, well, sir, Sammy Davis Jr. didn't have one eye. The Secret Kidd from Southwest Philly has been rocking this town since Frank Rizzo was mayor, and he has made it his business not to let any of us forget it.
Before there was an internet, before there was YouTube and FaceBook, Kenny Kweder plastered his face all over town the old fashioned way -- with criminally unremovable posters glued like epoxy to every wall and lamp post on the South Street corridor. Double K explains the method to his grafitti-guerilla madness in the mid-70's: "Nobody knew who I was. I wanted to create a buzz before anyone even heard me play."
It worked. He became a local rock and roll legend by dint of ceaseless self promotion. And people who never heard him play thought Kenn Kweder and the Secret Kidds must be the second coming of T. Rex or Alvin Lee. And when first-time listeners among the pre-irony-is-dead South Street hipster crowd heard Kweder and the Kidds, they didn't know what to make of him or them.
And so a legend, already born, became a performer winning a loyal audience one gig at a time. And several drinks each time. Think of the throbbing Doors rhythm "Oh show me. . . the way. . . to the next. . . whiskey bar. . ." flirting through a Bob Dylan songbook filled with spare Beatles harmonies. Whatever Kenn Kweder was then, and is now, it's been home grown different. Kool, kweer and klear. A Philadelphia original.
Thirty-some years down the road Kenn Kweder is still rockin' his ass off. One gig at a time. And still modest as ever as evidenced by his new about-to-be-released lifetime performance DVD called, self-depricatingly, "A MILLION LIGHT YEARS OF KENN KWEDER. PANDEMONIUM LIVE!"
You gotta love this guy.
And you gotta love him for his honesty, his intensity and his own definition of the brass ring he's never stopped reaching for. Fuck star. Kenny Kweder's goal is rock god. Laughing all the way to the next gig. The next audience. The next chance to be heard.
This guy is the real deal.
On Friday evening , Sept. 28, Kenn Kweder will play two shows at the Tin Angel, at 20 S. 2nd Street in Center City during the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am release party for A MILLION LIGHT YEARS OF KENN KWEDER. PANDEMONIIUM LIVE!
Tell'um Clarkie sent'cha!
Continue reading "the ripoff redux; King Kweder rules again" »
MY COLUMN yesterday about the haka war dance performed by the New Zealand All Blacks before Rugby World Cup matches drew this reaction from The International Rugby Board (IRB) :
ON THIS FIRST SUNDAY of the NFL season I want you to go to YouTube. Type in the word "haka" in the search field and see what happens. If you aren't converted instantly into a fan of rugby football after watching the New Zealand All Blacks perform the Maori war dance called a haka before an international match, the Rugby World Cup may not be your cup of tea.
I MAY BE EXPRESSING a minority opinion here, but I believe that Maury Povich and Jerry Springer have done more for interracial tolerance than Martin Luther King Jr. After all Dr. King only dreamed of the day when white people and black people would be judged not by the color of their skin, but rather by the content of their character.
ONE OF THE PRETTIEST GIRLS in Philadelphia can be seen almost as obviously as William Penn atop City Hall. Except the 23-foot-tall statue of Columbia, the allegorical female representation of motherland America, sits atop the green glass and iron dome of Memorial Hall in Faimount Park. In her heyday, Columbia looked over the millions from around the world who gathered beneath her during the 1876 Centennial Celebration, the World's Fair in West Philly that announced the United States as being one of the great industrial powers of the earth. Later she crowned Philadelphia's original Museum of Art and after that the Fairmount Park Commission headquarters.
