Monthly Archives: August 2011

Making Baseball Better

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In my fifth grade memory book, I wrote that in twenty years I would be as good at basketball as Joe Smith and as good at baseball as Cal Ripken Jr.

Well I guess I still have 4 years…

I was a baseball nut when I was a kid.  My next door neighbors had season tickets to the Orioles games and we would go to a few games every season.  I had a strict uniform for all games.  An Orioles jersey (about 18 times too big), a baseball glove (in case a foul ball came our way), and a book about Cal Ripken, Jr (for autographs).  And nearly every game I would either spill Hawiian punch or ketchup on my white jersey.  My mother is a laundry genius.

I used to make my family stay after as many games as I could get them to agree to and we would wait for the players to leave so I could hopefully get an autograph.  I wanted Cal’s or Brady Anderson’s, but the only signature I ever got was from Doug Jones.  Remember him?  I don’t really either.  I just remember being so disappointed that I got Doug Jones’ autograph.  Wasn’t he the worst closer ever or something?

I actually met Cal Ripken, Jr once.  It was Mother’s Day and players were at all of the gates welcoming Mothers to the game with carnations.  We just happened to go to the main gate that day and there he was, all dressed for the game and ready to go.  I approached him like I imagine I’d approach a god of some kind.  Everything else went blurry.  I forgot how to talk.  He was SO tall!  He saw the Cal Ripken book in my hand and made a joke about me reading during the game.  I didn’t even think to hand it over to him, and then he turned to my little sister Nicki.

“And how old are you?  4?” (or something like that, I was still in lala land)

Um, Nicki was not 4, she was 6.  And she was mad at Cal Ripken for the rest of the night because he dared to think she was 4 years old!  I, however, was mad at myself for the rest of the night.  All of those times waiting out front after the games and my autograph opportunity was pretty much handed to me – and I still had a blank book?  Really?!?

Anyway.  A lot has changed since then.  I have a lot of fantastic Orioles memories and I still consider myself a fan, but they are just not fun to watch anymore.  And because life gets really busy after 5th grade, I’ve started paying attention to baseball less and less.

But last Friday, with Nicki in town, we wanted to do something very L.A.  I looked through all of my touristy books and did a few Google searches, but we were kind of hungover and didn’t really want to exert a lot of energy into anything.

And then I thought of the Dodgers.  Another team that’s really not doing so hot right now, therefore tickets are easy to come by.  We went online for tickets and then headed downtown to check this stadium out.

Best idea ever.

Turns out, 45 years ago this weekend was the Beatles 2nd to last show ever, and it just happened to be at Dodger field.  The entire night was Beatles themed.  And oh, have you met my family?  We are Beatle-maniacs.  We play Beatles RockBand together and involve Beatles music in our weddings and know every word to every song.  We converted Brad when I started dating him, and now he’s come over to the dark side.  Him and a few friends back in Ithaca called themselves “The Yokos” and had listening nights for the re-mastered albums when they came out.  Oh yea, he’s one of us now.

So everything was Beatles all night long.  The font all around the stadium was Beatles font.  The organist played Beatles songs throughout the game.  There were videos of the concert and interviews from people who were there.  Did you know the Hell’s Angels rescued the Beatles that night from the swarms of fans?  Thanks, Dodger Stadium, for your Beatles trivia.

We realized early on that we hadn’t heard of a single player on either team, but the Beatles made it all better.  We ate a Dodger dog and did all the baseball game stuff you have to do (even got frozen yogurt in a Dodger helmet).  A foul ball even came within a few rows of us.  But we were mostly just waiting for the little Beatles moments.  And we were mostly waiting for the after-game.

Beatles Fireworks.

So the Dodgers won.  It was a great and exciting 7th inning, blah, blah, blah…  But once the game ended, the real show began.  And what’s even better than Beatles fireworks?  How about Dodger stadium letting everyone and anyone onto the outfield to sit and watch the show??  Seriously.  Please come down to trample and sit on our perfectly manicured grass.

Don’t mind if I do.

It was the coolest thing I’ve done in L.A. so far.  We sat on the left field grass in the darkened stadium and watched fireworks to a Beatles playlist.  Little kids, grandparents, and every age in between knew all the words and turned it into a huge sing-a-long.  My mom did make the point later that they should have included the song “Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds”, but other than that obvious omission, it was perfection.

Here’s the finale to “All You Need Is Love”.  You know, if your nostalgic for the 4th of July or something…

Baseball is still great, but the Beatles make everything better.

Oh, and mom?  I spilled frozen yogurt on my white shirt.  Had to keep the tradition alive…

Party Like Its FL 2004

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So I move to California and begin getting nervous every time I have to stop under a bridge while driving around LA.  What if there’s an earthquake?  I don’t want to be under a bridge in an earthquake!  As an east-coaster suddenly faced with news about fault lines and earthquake awareness, I started living in constant fear that the earth would start to shake under me and horrible things would happen.  But I’ve been on earthquake watch for a year and a half now with absolutely nothing to legitimately worry about, and the ENTIRE east coast gets shaken up this week by a 5.9.

Let me just add here that however this confuses/annoys me (as well as adds to my constant fear), I am very glad everyone is alright and that there was relatively small amounts of damage.  But really?  I live in an earthquake mecca and my east coast friends all now know how it feels?

Sigh.

And now there is this Irene.  I probably shouldn’t say anything until the storm has passed and I know that everyone and every thing is fine, but I’m taken back to this time of year in 2004.  The beginning of my junior year at Rollins, when four hurricanes rolled through Central Florida over the course of two months. Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne delayed the start of school, closed down campus a few times, and caused dorms to be evacuated.

We also had some killer Hurricane Parties.

We prepared for the storm the best way any college kids could.  We stocked up on beer and liquor.  Frat boys handed out flyers with addresses of off campus houses where the beer pong and flip cup would be going until the power went out and the beer got warm.  And even then, we would drink warm beer.  In the dark.

Six girls from my sorority stayed in a landlord’s apartment and we raised our own hurricane hell.  We watched Disney movies (that was all she had) and made our own video documentary of the storm complete with interviews and live news coverage.  I think the highlight of the amateur video was someone dropping a Police Maglight Flashlight on my little toe during a sing-a-long of some kind just before the power went out.  We replayed that footage about a million times.  My face was priceless.  And I think my toe was broken.

See, in Florida we never had snow days.  We never had that random day off because Mother Nature dumped 5 feet off snow on us overnight.  We never had icy conditions or slush or sleet.  We never had a weather related excuse for classes to be canceled.  We had Hurricane Season and we made it count.

Fall semester of 2004 was one of my favorite times in college.  A few unplanned days off together to hunker down and let Mother Nature do her thing was the best way to spend some real quality time with your friends.  And nothing brings you closer than losing power (and therefore air conditioning) in August in Orlando, FL.  And thankfully, everything always turned out ok.  Mostly because there was always at least one gas station open on Colonial when we ran out of beer.  (We ran out of food even faster, but we were never as concerned about eating a balanced meal as we were about risking curfew for another case of Bud Light)

Be safe, East Coast.  I hope you are all plenty stocked up on booze, bread, and toilet paper.  We are thinking about you out here in LA and sending all of our blue-sky love your way!!

Toast

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World, meet Johnny Toast.

Turns out this character – who is in fact, a real person – came along with the package when I started dating Brad.  He hides in the Sig Ep composites between 1988 and 1992 that hang on the walls of a bar in Ithaca called ‘The Chapter House”.

And now he is a huge part of my life.

I learned early on in my relationship with Brad that he had a friend he called Johnny Toast.  I knew his real name was Steven, but he was in Brad’s phone as Johnny Toast and he was usually just called “Toast”.  And before I had been to Ithaca, Brad couldn’t explain the nickname to me.  He just swore he would just show me one day.

Doesn’t that picture just explain why you have to see it in person?

Maybe this one will give you some more information…

All of the other 1988 SigEps are completely normal 1988 Cornell University students.  Nice suits, nice ties, neat hair and a pleasant frat-boy smile.

Not Toast.

First of all, his real name is John Santos, but doesn’t go by that.  He is the only one on the composite with his nickname included and the only one rocking a mullet and those fly 1988 sunglasses.  He is just so FRESH!

Steven and Brad were immediately drawn to this fly mentor-from-another-generation and started using “Toast” not just as a nickname, but as a real way of life.  Words like “Toast-mostest” were added to their vocabulary.  I have Toast coasters (Toasters.  Serious.) in my apartment.  Toast became an icon among all who knew them.  How did he come to be so fly??

Believe me, we have done many a late-night intoxicated Google search to try and find out more about this man of mystery. You know, just to see where all that freshness got him.  And to see how much more fly he could have possibly gotten after graduation.  I bet he wears Louboutin slippers and a velvet robe and just smokes cigars all day.  And I bet he NEVER takes off his sunglasses.  I mean, just LOOK at him!

I wish they had Facebook back in 1988, because no one can find Toast.

My little sister, Nicki, has been to the Chapter House and knows all about Toast.  She can find anything online.  Stuff that I wouldn’t even know could be online, she finds it online.

Nicki couldn’t find Toast.

But one day she was at a coffee shop in Delaware where they happened to have a few old Cornell yearbooks laying around.  There he was – Mr. Toast – in the black and white pictures with his other Sig Ep brothers in a Delaware coffee shop.

My faith in Nicki’s searching abilities were restored with that picture message.

Sadly, I am lead to believe Johnny’s freshness didn’t last too much longer after his freshman year.  We don’t really like to admit it, but this picture of Toast hangs at the Chapter Room also.  It’s from 1991.

Still rocking that party-in-the-back hair cut, but maybe he was over the shades by ’91.  And what happened to the “Toast”?  Is this the more mature Toast?  More undercover?  Was it just cloudier that day?

We will never know.

We pretty much gave up our search when Steven’s mom, who works at Cornell, couldn’t even find him through alumni records.  And after Nicki’s failed Googling, we put our search for John “Toast” Santos on the back burner.

I think at one point we were looking to send him an invitation to our wedding.  I had probably been drinking when that decision had been made.  He never got his invite, but don’t worry, he was definitely there in spirit.  The boys made sure of that.  No mullets (or pants, apparently) required.

Bmore vs. Malibu

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I have discovered in the past week that I am more of a gangster than I give myself credit for.

Hear me out, Cali friends.

I was driving to my business meeting yesterday in my cargo pants and flip-flops – pretty Cali of me – down the PCH with my windows down.  The ocean was to my left, mountains to my right, and a little bit of a fog hung on to the blue sky you could see peeking out every now and then.  And as the salty wind whipped through my blonde California hair, “Watch the Throne” was bumping on my stereo.  I am hooked on Kanye and Jay-Z’s new album.  It’s smart, it’s powerful, and I bet it was just a whole lot of fun for those two to get together for an entire album.  I’m a music chick, I think about the recording process…

But driving through Malibu yesterday, I realized this was not the ideal soundtrack for this occasion.

On the East Coast, back in Ocean City or even up into Rehoboth, this would have been perfectly acceptable.  I never would have thought twice about it.  I bet if you were in OCMD this weekend you heard it blasting from most of the cars driving up Rt 1, stuck at red lights.

But something about the songs with those heavy beats and dark lyrics about all the murder in the world, fathers leaving sons and past lives as a dope dealer… It just seems a little out of place in Malibu.

It’s the same way that out here in Santa Monica I’ve had to read the Washington Post to get any real updates and information on what is going on with our government right now.  Sure, the LA Times covers it.  And some of their articles are very well written on the topic.  But as soon as Lindsay Lohan breaks a nail, the budget ceiling is bumped down to a tiny headline in the newsfeed.  I call home sometimes and my family talks about the pending government shut-downs like we talk about Carmageddon.  I mean, the government shut-down could have probably been like DC’s 405 being closed on a weekday.

People here get angry when Obama comes to town.  And its not about political parties or budget reform.  It’s about rush hour traffic and street closures.  We are 3000 miles from DC and Angeleno’s like to keep it that way.  We have an entertainment industry to run.  Keep the traffic moving.

I just looked to see if I was being outrageously cynical, and the big story on the LA Times website right now is about a man who has 19 naked David statues (think Michelangelo).  Apparently, he is selling his house and his 19 statues because they have overshadowed his singing career.

Really.

So anyway, I didn’t turn down the WTT as I was driving.  I let my senses get confused.  I thought about what music those groups of surfers listened to as they cruised here this morning.  I thought about all of the differenet genres of music I have on my iPod right now.  I thought about the Dead Weather creepy rock show Brad and I went to a couple of months ago and then the Ellie Goulding British pop we just saw last week with Deva.  I bet sometimes those Malibu surfers like a little Kanye and Jay-Z, also.  I mean, “Watch the Throne” broke the record for most first week sales on iTunes this past week.  Somebody’s buying it.

But Katy Perry just seems a little more Malibu to me.  Or MGMT.  Or just anything upbeat and breezy.  But maybe that’s the prejudice of the East Coast in me.

I decided, so what?  I’m a little Bmore gangster.  I’m also a little pop, a lot of dance, a bit of indy, a little bit rock and roll, a tad musical theatre, a bit of jazz, a little bit West Coast and a whole lot of East Coast all rolled into one.  And I will give my new West Coaster’s view of Malibu whatever soundtrack I’m feeling that day.

She’s Not Doing What I Tell Her To Do!

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My mom could tell you the whole story about that title…  How it has something to do with Kimberly Baker and something to do with me being a bossy six year old girl who wasn’t getting what she wanted.  I probably wanted to play school and Kimberly probably wanted to play house.  I was a brat sometimes.  I still can be, actually.  Don’t I look bratty?

But I thought this was appropriate beginning to my new blog because I have been blogging the past two months for this fantastic company MixtapeMedia about all of the aspects of social media and how to use them.  I love writing for them and researching all of these crazy topics, but I realized I really like to write.  And I want to write about what I want to write about sometimes, too!  (Bratty Kels)  So here goes.

Basically, I am Kels.  Yes, that bratty six year old girl has become a really-not-so-bratty 27 year old who lives in the ginormous city of Los Angeles with her chef husband and spastic Lab mix.  I am a musician, foodie, wino, mixologist, writer and artist who is figuring out her way alongside the other 9.8 million people who are out here paying entirely too much for rent.  And I’m trying not to become obese from my husband’s amazing cooking and our addiction to the restaurants of L.A.  It could be a full time job, really.

“In the Key of Kels” is just for me to share what’s going on out here in sunny SoCal – including all the food and restaurants, music and concerts, married life and bartender stories, apartment issues, east coast longing and vintage-looking beach pictures that come along with it.  All from this East-Coaster’s perspective.

But for now I’m off to a meeting in Malibu in my flip flops and cargo pants.  SoCal life can be really tough…