Megan Stielstra's Blog

Sports have never been my thing (not since 1984 when the Tigers were in the World Series. I was nine and knew that Alan Trammel and Lou Whitaker were the longest running double-play combo in baseball history. I would sit on my dad’s shoulders and chant, “LOU LOU LOU!” with the rest of the crowd, and one time I dumped my ice cream cone onto the top of his head—so the story goes). I point this out because I just watched the Superbowl, and now I’m going to talk about it, and I’m sure I’ll do so poorly the same way I would if I tried talking about nuclear testing or sheep farming or any other fairly complex activity that I’ve never paid attention to because I’ve been too busy paying attention to the things I’ve been paying attention to. Hi! When one watches the Superbowl, one drinks beer!

My reasoning was as follows:

1. I’m a Chicagoan.

2.I run writing workshops for the 2nd Story storytelling series and this guy, Nick, has been working on a piece about football. About how it bring people together. About how whole communities are created in the joy or sorrow of a win or a loss and that all of us can share in the energy of such a moment. I like that idea: all sorts of different people connecting on this common ground.

3.Christopher showed me how much money we have on this game. WE being, of course, HE, but really WE, because it’s OUR money, and while I don’t understand gambling, I do understand logic which dictates that my husband can do whatever HE wants with OUR money because in the very near future WE are going to spend a fuckton at Neiman’s. For US.

Let’s recap: yaaaaay Chicago, community and Neiman Marcus!! GO BEARS!

Okay, so thirteen seconds into the game—while I am marveling at the blinding light caused by fifty thousand cameras going off at exactly the same time—something happens to make Christopher yell, “NO FUCKING WAY THAT JUST HAPPENED!” and start jumping up and down so then the dog goes nuts ‘cause he thinks it’s a game and then the phone rings ‘cause our friend Jeremy is on the road coming back from Michigan and, apparently, can’t get the game on his radio ‘cause there’s a snow storm but he was at the drive-through window at Taco Bell and everybody who works there was screaming and yelling ‘cause of whatever just happened in the first thirteen seconds so Christopher gives Jeremy a play-by-play during which he gets all excited all over again, so now he’s yelling and Jeremy is yelling and Taco Bell is yelling and the dog is barking and the TV commentators are saying, “WHOAH, JOHN, LOOK AT THAT!” and in the background everybody’s cheering and hugging and loving their neighbor and then, so far as I could tell, it was all downhill from there.

I’m guessing this has something to do with the fact that it was POURING RAIN in Miami and every time somebody got their hands on the football it slipped away (like those cartoons where the bar of soap jumps out of the guy’s fingers and he has to chase it down the stairs, except in this scenario he chases it across an bright green field and is then attacked from all sides by twenty big, sweaty men in white pants. WET white pants. Twenty big men in wet white pants rolling around in the grass trying to grasp a bar of soap, and we call it a wholesome American tradition. Twenty WOMEN in exactly the same situation and we call it pay-per-view). “THE BALL IS TOO WET!” Christopher yelled. “THEY CAN’T HOLD ONTO IT!” He was VERY worked up. He was camped out in front of the TV with beer, brats, nachos, all these sheets of paper telling him which scores he bet on and also what everybody in his entire office bet on, and— because he is THIS much of a geek—his laptop was open following three different chat room threads: one discussing the game, one discussing the halftime show and one membership-only design site discussing the quality of the commercials.

“How is the quality of the commercials?” I asked him. “What do all those designers say?”

“They say the commercials suck,” he said, studying his monitor.

“Don’t commercials always suck?” I asked.

“MEGAN,” he said, very exasperated (which was funny because all night I’d been saying very stupid stereotypical dumb-blonde things because I’ve never watched football before and I just don’t GET it yet, and he’d been very patient, explaining the littlest things over and over, but when it comes to good or bad design I’m supposed to just, you know, KNOW BETTER). “This is the SUPERBOWL. It costs 2.6 million dollars per thirty seconds of Superbowl commercial time! Years of design go into these commercials! There are whole websites devoted to their creation!”

I looked back at the TV: a godaddy commercial was on, the one where the exec walks into the marketing department and many near-naked women are being sprayed with seltzer and laughing. By my count, that same commercial was shown three times during the Superbowl—three times! 7.8 million dollars! You’d think if you’re gonna spend THAT much cash, you’d at least make sure your commercial was a good one, but they were all really bad which personally I find upsetting ‘cause advertising seems like one of those last frontiers where an artist can actually make a decent buck, and also spending 2.6 million to show Jessica Simpson eating a pizza in the back of a limo makes me want to puke in my mouth.

(insert long paragraph on ways that money could be better spent: Rebuilding in Florida, Darfur, Africa, the Gulf Coast, education. I just read an article in Vogue about dressing for the Oscars which gave me the same feeling, but then they talked about the time Sharon Stone wore a Gap T-Shirt to the Oscars and on the way, from the back of her limo, she called the CEO of Gap [‘cause I guess if you’re Sharon Stone you just have the CEO of Gap on speed dial?] and told him what she was doing and in gratitude he gave this OBSCENE amount of money to the charity of her choice, and the next day all the magazines were all SHARON STONE WEARS GAP TO THE OSCARS and sales just sky rocketed, and I thought that was so totally brilliant so I yelled, “GO SHARON STONE!” and Christopher from the next room yelled back, ‘You HATE Sharon Stone!” and I yelled back, “SHARON STONE KICKED SOME SERIOUS ASS DRESSING FOR THE OSCARS IN 1996!” and he yelled back, “DID YOU JUST SPEAK ENGLISH?”—in case you’re wondering why we’re screaming at each other, let me explain: our new place is next door to the Aragon Ballroom [which is a rock music venue, if you’ve never been, but you should call it the Aragon BRAWLROOM if you want to sound very hip and in-the-know (‘cause apparently back in the day there were all sorts of fights there. Now, as I watch from the balcony, there’s limousines dropping off groups of fourteen year old girls to go see bands featured on 109.1 the Mix)] so the developers of our building hired “acoustic engineers” to make sure that sound wasn’t a problem. They did their job so well that Christopher and I can’t hear each other from opposite ends of the place without yelling—where were we? Oh yes: Sharon Stone doing good things with crazy amounts of money. I LIKE people who do good things with crazy amounts of money. And by that, I mean GIVE IT AWAY TO PEOPLE WHO REALLY NEED IT, NOT siphon 450,000 pounds of petroleum jelly on board a Japanese whaling boat and film the whole thing solidifying and/or melting while Bjork wears weird costumes and an old man pours tea? (Christopher and I watched the making of Drawing Restraint 9 over the weekend and it ticked me off just as much as 7.8 million dollars for bad commercials or 1500 hundred dollars for football tickets or 100,000 thousand for Oscar dresses) but then, of course, who am I to judge?

What was I talking about?

Oh yes: PRINCE.

That performance just rocked my world. I mean, it was POURING—we have HDTV and I could see every individual DROP!—and he’s out there singing Let’s Go Crazy on a PURPLE STAGE OF FIRE with smoke machines and back-up dancers and exploding microphones and they let all these people come out onto the field with little flashlights or whatever and then the marching bands came out and they had electric uniforms and he did Purple Rain and everybody sang aloud and that, that, that was community.

To sum up the rest of the game (from the point of view of someone who has no idea what was happening but still, for some reason unbeknownst to her, cared):

1.Christopher said, “Shit,” much more often than “Yay!”

2.More rain.

3.More poorly designed commercials (although Christopher liked the ones from careerbuilder, and the one with a hitchhiker and a chainsaw and Bud Light, and also one featuring Robert Goulet (?) where he taped people to chairs and, “caused much mayhem and havoc and then climbed the ceiling searching for nuts.”)

4.The Bears lost.

5.God was thanked profusely.

6. Every single Bears fan interviewed said it didn’t matter that they lost because they would take it next year. Which I thought was pretty cool: one second they were losers and ten minutes later we’re all back to hope. Made me proud to be Chicagoan—proud that my city takes care of its own and hopes for the best and doesn’t waste time wallowing in misery.

(Although later, when we were getting ready for bed, Christopher said, “Mojo, you’re so lucky you’re a dog and not a human because you can’t experience crushing defeat.”)