Combining the thrills and spills of Football and Jerry Garcia
I walked out of my front door on Sunday at about 4:15 in the afternoon and headed down to The Dubliner. I never figured I’d go to a Super Bowl party, let alone one with a soundtrack by the Grateful Dead and Coors Light specials. Avoiding the bad beer would be easy enough. So why would I go? The simple answer is friendship.
First though, let me tell you about The Dubliner. This place looks huge from the outside with it’s two floors, large windows and rooftop lounge. However, this is quite deceiving as the building is a mere one unit wide. It is a very thin bar indeed and not well set up for a crowd but all in all a decent place to hang out. The food was pretty good too, but I’ll get to that later. I made my way up to the second floor where they move the pool table out of the way for the band.
Dragons With Matches plays the music of the Grateful Dead who, to be honest, I never really got into. At least not to the extent of these folks. Still, I love to watch them play. Four of the seven members are very good pals of mine and some of the most talented and fun people I know. Freddy Testa (Guitar, Vocals), Mike Finn (Guitar, Vocals), Marcia Finn (Guitar, Vocals) and Chris Rydstrom (Drums). I’ve had the chance to jam and party with them on various occasions thru the years. They actually give the Dead life (yeah I know, bad pun … but it’s true). They have this joyful energy that reminds me of kids in a playground. All smiles, all bliss. Especially Freddy who often gets completely caught up in the twister.
Meeting me there was Liz and a group of her friends. Ann, Jess and Maria. Eric was there too as were other familiar faces. Eric is still trying to get me back into playing music on a regular basis. I’m just not ready yet. Troy was there too. He’s still having trouble letting go of the gay jokes directed at me.
The band played thru the boring pre-game. Then, once the boring game started, the bar played Grateful Dead CDs. Liz leaned over to me and said sarcastically, “Wow they got everything for you, huh? The Dead, Football. What else could you ask for?” I replied, “Coors Light specials!” and we laughed at the surreal absurdity of the whole thing.
At one point I could see the girls huddling as if to try and block a pushy pick-up artist. Sure enough, that’s what they were doing. When it didn’t work, they decided to go to the downstairs bar to get some food. We all ordered various versions of the Dubliner Burger and some drinks. The conversation started weird enough with a discussion the number of vaginas on a koala bear. This lead to multiple penetration black porn with skanky, gagging crack whores. Somehow we ended up on asshole bleaching and bikini waxing. God I love hanging out with women.
After the food, we sat for a while watching the half time mess. At first we all started yelling that Mick Jagger was lip syncing. However, thanks to the pussy producers fearing the FCC, they had a five second delay on the game. This was unnoticeable during play time, but when the Rolling Stones hit the stage, you could see it was out of sync. I do have to say that it sounded really good, as long as you didn’t look at the screen. Normally the sound at these things suck.
We decided to go back up stairs to hang with our friends, but the band was not playing, the game just wasn’t enough to keep us going and the girls were huddling again for pick-up protection. So slowly, one by one we left. Eventually I’d find out the the Steelers had won. No big deal for me since it was only a few days ago that I even found out who was playing. Liz and I were rooting for the Seahawks strictly for environmental reasons. Birds are good and the steel industry is bad. At least that was our logic, and we stuck to it, even though the Seahawks lost.
As I walked, it struck me how dead (this time no pun intended) the town seemed to be for Super Bowl Sunday. A day that Liz found out is the largest eating day in America after Thanksgiving. The tonnage of chips and wings and gallons of beer is pretty gross, but not unexpected.
I was home by 10:00 and just relaxed for a bit until sleep came. Despite the oddity of the activities for me, I really enjoyed the day.
