The Lady is Back in Town

Dulcinea arrived back in Kansas City after her summer sojourn to Minnesota. I picked her up at the airport on Thursday evening and we turned the weekend into a mucho dinero burning goodtime.

On the way from the airport we checked out the Zona Rosa. The first time for me. Yeah, it's okay, but a bit too sterile and pre-fab, sort of like Johnson County. I prefer the diversity and spontaneity that I find in the City.

It reminded me of a visit to the Homer Dome in Minneapolis years ago, before the advent of the Homer hanky and excitement in Minnesota Twins baseball. It felt as if I was at a tea party; polite applause was the emotion of the afternoon. The stadium was clean, air conditioned, most of the fans looked of Swedish or Norwegian ancestry. The concession stand employees were the same type of geriatrics you see at Wal-Mart as greeters and bussing tables at McDonalds.

Later that summer I went to a Cardinals day game in St. Louis. It was hot and humid. People were black and white. Rabid fans were hysterically cheering for favorite players and applauding even mediocre plays. And there was that sometimes embarrassing silence or even booing of the opposition. There were big, sweaty Budweiser concessionaire’s working the stands humping along huge drums of iced-down beer yelling out in their almost musical way, “Get your Bud here, ice cold Bud here!” Sometimes you can still hear them in the background of a radio game. Now that was a ballgame.