Reminiscing, Baseball ... and Gym Class?

I was at Harvard last weekend, part of Spec’s delegation to a fancy-pants conference for Ivy League editors. There were big-shot keynoters and lots of informative sessions on everything from photojournalism to newsroom management. My favorite part was how they started at 9 a.m.

I picked a slightly different schedule—first I had a lecture on sleeping until noon (on a waterbed!), and then a seminar on eating lunch outside and playing Grand Theft Auto, and then there was a breakout session on playing catch in the quad. I made it to the actual conference in time for the last session of the day, a narrative reporting workshop where I got to tell the story about how my grandmother had to quit using her chain saw because it would make her pacemaker accelerate.

Yes, spring is here. And as I look through my itchy, red, hay-fever eyes at the 40-swilling hordes on Low Steps, I have this to say: check me out of the Hotel Columbia. No more papers, no more tests, no more crack-of-1-p.m. racquetball classes.

I am, however, going to miss this column. In my four years, I’ve written 34 Wet Hot Americans—35 if you include March’s Pixbox Champion column. That’s more than the number of my Lit Hum, Logic and Rhetoric, and CC papers combined, although I suppose there is slightly less discipline involved in writing about Drinking Scrabble than “The Theoretical Limits of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.”

This is the last regular installment of Wet Hot, which is a shame, because I have four completely unrelated things to discuss:

1. I’m going to miss having a job where pleasing 95 percent of the audience means making passing references to forgotten pillars of pop culture. For example: Hey, remember Small Wonder, the sitcom with Vicki, the robot daughter? I think the theme song went a little something like...

She’s fantastic, made of plastic

Microchips here and there

She’s a small wonder,

Brings love and laughter everywhere!

Actually having to work for a living—now that’s something to make my eyes red.

2. I’ve spent a lifetime wishing I could be a baseball fan, and now that the Nationals are in Washington, I can tell you that it was worth the wait. Following the team every day, poring over stats, memorizing the pitching rotation—it’s enough to not make me miss the hockey season a little bit less. And believe it or not, the ex-Expos are tied for first place in the NL East. Maybe they can take it all the way! Hold on a sec, my editor is telling me something... The season is how many games long?

Probably the best part of having a hometown baseball team is that it gives me something to talk to my dad about on the phone, aside from the current temperature, our cat, if it is windy, and whether he is going to write a book about the jailing of my great-great-grandfather in the Dry Tortugas for his part in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. By the way—when you come from Virginia, as I do, that is some kind of street cred.

3. Speaking of coming from Virginia, the world needs to know something: In high school, my gym teacher once split our class into the American Squad and the International Squad for a game of softball.

All the white kids were on the American Squad, minus my friend Lars, who may or may not have actually had any Scandinavian heritage. All the black and Hispanic kids were on the International Squad, minus one guy who was deemed not sufficiently black. I went to a wonderful, wonderful high school, but this particular gym teacher was a train wreck.

This is a man who claimed to have been on the team immortalized in Remember the Titans. Once, on the bench (I guess the International Squad was in the field), he confided/bragged to me that he sometimes batted a softball across the gym in the direction of a girl who used a prosthetic leg, in an attempt to “knock that sucker off.” My friend David says he witnessed this. “I never saw her fall,” he reports, “but I know that he at least made her stumble once.”

4. Confidential to MO, PC, CG, BS, NC, JS, EH, TF, HC, SH, ZB, TO, CC, RR, AS: Congratulations. Your first assignment: pick a fruit that you feel encapsulates—oh, wait...