I love this town. We went to the State Capitol to see the azaleas and went on our generally annual trip to the observation deck to see the city from on high.
One of the guards up there waved us over, excitedly pointing to the other guard, "Look at this guy! Played in the first Super Bowl in the United States!" and suddenly former Kansas City Chief (and Brown and Raider) Frank Pitts was showing us his Super Bowl I ring. I still wasn't really sure what was going on when he took them off for my wife to hold and get a closer look. I managed a quick video.
But serious, how sweet is the world that a guy who won the first Super Bowl just hands over his rings to look at and has a cake job like guarding the observation deck over that world, and that another old man guard has a buddy like this to heap his excitement on.
Saturday night I went to an excellent reading at this art gallery/warehouse space, the kind of thing that you don't think happens here and turns out the Blake Butler reading was the hyper-productive Blake Butler of HTMLGIANT. He wrote a great creepy piece about (I think) an online chat session. I wrote a piece on that website once and figured he wouldn't remember it but either he did or played it off well that he did. I bought his exquisite eschatology bummer Scorch Atlas; so metal is this take of a blackened, dying, diseased world (perhaps made this way by some sort of super-moon) that the page ends are painted black and the leaves printed with gray water stains. Fun! The Alan Lomax biography continues to be luminous.
Saturday day was the St. Patrick's Day parade and Chicago style dogs and boutique, you-gotta-know-the-lady-to-get-them desserts and green hair spray. Azaleas! Sport peppers! Beads! Excuse me, trying to shoot a video here! Love this town!
There is an interesting story about those rings. His house got broken into and his original rings were stollen but the staff at the capital and the legislators (in a rare act of genuine charity) collected enough money to buy replacements. Or, I remember something like that.
ReplyDeleteFigures. Typical layabout, going from one union post to the next, riding the lavish graaaaavy traaaaaaain, flaunting his jewels like that king on Schoolhouse Rock. Disgusting!
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