I can look at football, but I can't see it. I may seem to be staring at the flatscreen high-def TV, but ask me anything about the game – the score, a huge play that just happened, which team is which – and I'm a total blank.
However, I can talk about the Super Bowl's , the unflattering way football players' butts are packed into shiny tights, my aversion to concussion-seeking sports, how Madonna miraculously blasted back into the innards of the stage or shattered into anti-matter or worm-holed herself into another dimension in the name of World Peace or whatever the heck happened to her. Has anyone seen Madonna since? Should we be worried?
This may be the first Game in my lifetime, no joke, that I've ever gone out of my way to celebrate. There have been other Super Bowls with the Giants to root for (only a few years ago) and there have been plenty of parties no matter who is competing, but for whatever reason, this was my first. Take my American citizenship away if you must but I think I might prefer that other football: soccer.
As a first-time experience though, I give it a few guacamole-covered thumbs up. Not for the football of course but everything swirling around it. My family gathered in the highly carpeted and very kid-friendly basement of a friend's house. Here we deposited our little ones on a huge blanket covered with bowls of snacks and and watched them gorge themselves on chips and dips for about four hours straight.
In retrospect, my approach to the evening was certainly too feminine. Breaking the man-food rules (grease, cheese, meat), I brought quiche (with spinach and mushrooms, no less). The drink in my glass was a Bermuda blue in color and from one of those odd-shaped misty bottles labelled Hypnotique. Add splash of orange juice and I was a believer.
One might assume my allegiances were torn as I am a New Englander (hailing from Connecticut, and not the NYC commuter borough quadrant) from birth. But I've lived and loved and rooted for all things NY ever since I hightailed it out of town after college. Like bagels and chocolate egg creams and pickles, if not exactly football teams. On this night, I was tempted to take my hostess's approach, who was rooting for the Patriots because "Tom Brady is hot." Who? I asked.
So it was the food and not the tight pants that excited me most, then the drinks, then Madonna, and lastly the commercials, or maybe first the drinks...
Did Madonna's choreography seem super-stiff? For such a yoga expert, she seemed tight. But those stage effects, if that cosmic computerized thing even was a stage, were hard to grasp. And that man bouncing near her on an elastic cable? Words can't describe.
Alas, my true loyalties took hold at the end of the third quarter, when, rather than watch the end of the game, I whispered to my husband that it was time for us to get our weary and chip-bloated children home to bed. Putting the kids to bed always beats anything.
