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Friday, July 22, 2005
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NU As the world explodes around us, let us take refuge in the trivial. UD doesn’t know why she and Patti Davis didn’t cross paths long ago at Northwestern University. UD’s a bit vague on the years - Davis is older than I am - and Davis dropped out of NU and transferred to USC pretty quickly. Still, they went there at roughly the same time. Davis doesn’t mention having attended NU in a piece she wrote recently about the school’s championship women’s lacrosse team, some of whose members wore flipflops to meet President Bush and thereby scandalized many people who thought they should have dressed more formally. Herself a total slob, UD feels uncomfortable chiming in on this one; but the story certainly brought back memories of NU. There weren’t any winning sports teams in my day. I remember going to one and only one football game at NU, which was at that time a major football joke all over the world. It was a bright clear very cold afternoon. UD and her friends sat up high in the stadium. The players were squiggly things in purple doing God knows what down there. Losing by sixty points. It was understood that the team would lose, so UD’s cohort had a fine time floating on the surreality of the situation. None of them understood or gave a rat's patootie about football, and their only interest was in scoring the precise degree of humiliation which their team, as usual, was undergoing at the hands of some truly Big Ten outfit. I still remember how much fun it was to cheer hysterically, knowing that our team was a huge obvious loser. There was a tension-free, let-it-all-go feel to it. Years and years later, UD had the inestimable privilege of going to a Washington Redskins game. You have to live in DC to know just how sought-after Redskins tickets are. A friend of a friend couldn’t use them, so we got them. We sat high up in the stadium. The players were reddish squiggly things moving about. I grew bored and pulled out that day’s New York Times acrostic, which occupied me nicely for the next couple of hours. |