It's nice to know that no matter how inept a softball player you are, you can still claw your way up to middle management. The single worst softplayer I've ever witnessed -- a woman so bad that you had to wonder if she even grasped the concept of the game -- gets some publicity in this week's Dateline P-G. (It's not the woman featured as the "Profile of the Week, though.)
More about her in a minute. First let's backtrack a bit. Earlier this week, I shared some misery from my junior high years. By high school, I'd managed to ditch those losers and worm my way in with a slightly better class of people.
Band fags.
That's what our school called us, and we more or less took that handle, made it our own and wore it as a badge of honor. We WERE geeks, but entertaining geeks, I think -- and while we were miscreants and boozers, our shenanigans came nowhere near to the felonious nature of that of my previous pals.
At some point during our senior year, my fellow band fags and I began playing softball after school every day. Talents ranged from moderately bad to moderately good, and it was fun. At some point, one of the guys began bringing some fellows from his neighborhood -- for the most part, some very good players. Very good. We played mostly every day between my senior year and heading off to college. (That places this story somewhere in the summer of '81, for those of you keeping score at home. Also, others may disagree with my chronology -- in my mind, our softball shenanigans date back to the band fags, but perhaps these other guys were already playing elsewhere, and we just kind of mingled the two groups.)
During this time, I was dating my first girlfriend of any seriousness. She was a pretty good athlete, and sometimes she'd play along. Unfortunately, though, in addition to being a pretty good athlete, she was also pretty short and relatively slow. She could hit a ball over the infielders heads on a regular basis, but eventually the guys learned to cheat in on her -- and they started throwing her out at first from the outfield. Had to hurt.
Nonetheless, our little throng of s-ballers continued to grow. Most of the band fags dropped out, eventually, but friends of the new bunch joined in until we had a pretty substantial crowd. Eventually, it got to the point where no matter how good or how bad an athlete you were, chances were that you could join in -- and there'd be people both better and worse than you there. Being a pretty mediocre athlete myself, that was pretty comforting.
Surprisingly, the softball continued the next summer, when a bunch of us got back from college. At this point, one of the guys was dating a girl I'll call "Sally." Offhand, I have three distinct memories of Sally (who was also a friend of my gf.) In no particular order, they are:
- She shaved her toes
- When she joined me at Penn State a few years later, she developed a habit of coming over to my apartment every afternoon at 3 pm to watch Guiding Light with my roommates and I, and
- A story that I can't share and maintain my self-imposed PG-13 rating, but I will tell you the punchline, which is, "Well, what the hell do you think you just did?"
The last I heard of old Sally, she had dropped out of school, was following the Dead, and owned a goat. The bet here is that she probably stopped shaving her toes around that time period, as well.
So Sally decided to play softball with us one night, and brought a friend -- the woman I mentioned way back there in the first paragraph. And she was awful at softball. Really, really bad, bad enough to make even the worst of our lot look, well, not so bad.
But at some point, she must've managed to get on base, and then to second. At which point, the next batter hit one into the outfield, and her teammates told her to "go home! home!"
Now this girl may have been no softball player, but she did have a solid grasp of certain mathematical principles -- in particular, she knew full well that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Home she went...right over the pitcher's mound. I'm not sure if this next part is true or not, but in my mind we called her safe and counted the run.
Anyway, the fun & games continued for at least the next two summers, and possibly longer. Every summer, you'd get the call: "Softball. Tonight. Mount Mercy." There were too many characters to mention -- Smilin' Mike, the leftie who couldn't hit anywhere but right field to save his life -- Martin, the guy who seemingly took great delight in driving every first pitch about a 90-degree angle from home plate and across the road -- Juan the Torpedo...a guy with the inexplicable nickname of Fozzie, or sometimes Silk...C-Bubba, a guy named after the hiccupping refrain from a Tom-Tom Club song...hell, it was a good bunch, and we had fun.
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Speaking of fun, looks like Mary Worth is advising a neighbor to go after a married man:

This is a radically new approach for the formerly-dowdy old Mary. Perhaps in the sunset of her life, she's decided that monogamy really ain't all it's cracked up to be. What's next -- a naked romp in the apartment complex pool with Professor Cameron? A three-way with Tommy and Smitty Smedlap? Go for it, Mare, you dirty old broad.
Just for the record, I asked my wife to share her response if she learned that one of my old flames was trying to contact me.
"Yeah. I'd have a problem with that."