Yearly Archives: 2007

She Shoots, She Scores!

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Erincropped
As I’ve written before I’m the assistant coach for my daughter’s Challenge soccer team. Erin had to try out in May,
get selected for a team and that team will stay together through next
spring when the process is repeated (all the kids have to try out again). When she made the team I volunteered to be the assistant coach, which for all practical purposes means that she and I are spending more time together than we have in a long time, what with the two 1 1/2 hour practices plus two games each week.

The Challenge level of play is somewhere between the club level and what we called "Select" soccer in my day, which means that Erin definitely stepped into a higher level of competition this year. It’s safe to say that at first she was pretty intimidated by the faster, stronger and more skilled players, but now she’s starting to get comfortable.  Our team has played about eight games through this last weekend and after getting off to a rough start against some very good competition in the Twin City Classic tournament and against one of our sister teams from the TCYSA club, a team that returned 12 girls from last year’s roster, our girls have won four straight games.  Even better is the fact that most of the girls who stepped up from club level to play Challenge for the first time this season have started to score goals too.

Unfortunately Erin wasn’t one of the girls who scored…until yesterday.  With our team leading 2-1 and with about ten minutes left in the game, Erin received a pass at the top of the penalty box just outside the left post, took one or two dribbles and then curled a left footed shot inside the left post.  I know I’m biased, but I’m telling you it was one gorgeous shot.

The part I’ll never forget is the look on Erin’s face as she came off the field right after the goal.  I haven’t seen her smile that bright in a long time, and I’m willing to put in thousands more hours on the field with her if I get to see it even one more time.

The Battle of Shallowford

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The Raleigh Little Theatre is putting on The Battle of Shallowford from October 5-21, 2007.  Here’s an overview of the play from their website:

Ed Simpson’s play is an endearing story about what happens when the
residents of the small town of Shallowford (based on Lewisville, NC)
believe Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" to be
legitimate news. They fall hook, line and sinker, and grab their
pitchforks and hunting rifles, and run out to do battle with the
invading Martians and save the world.

The characters in the play are:

  • Burton Mock
  • Ruthie Mock
  • Lonny Hutchins
  • Clunette Campbell
  • Roy Sprinkle
  • Dewey Sowers
  • Newsome Jarvis
  • "Doodad" Jarvis
  • Fred Martin

The playwright, Ed Simpson, is a native of Lewisville so it should come as no surprise that the characters’ names sound familiar.  There are a TON of Mocks in the area (Mocksville is just 1/2 hour down the road) and we still have a Sowers on the town council.  Heck one of the barbers at the barbershop I go to is David Sowers.

I stumbled across this listing for the production in one of my news feeds and after seeing that it is based on the small town in which I live I started to do some digging.  I found a nice piece written by Mr. Simpson in 2003 upon his stumbling across a production of the play at Western Carolina University.  In it he mentions that he’s returning to North Carolina after living in Pennsylvania for 27 years, and after a little more digging I found his website and lo’ and behold he’s moved to Winston-Salem.  He’s now playwright-in-residence at High Point University.

In an interview that appeared in the LA Times in 2000 and is posted on his site Mr. Simpson states that Lewisville was a town of 500 residents when he was growing up (he’s in his mid-fifties now).  Lewisville is up to around 13,000 residents today and I have a new-found appreciation for how much this area has changed in the last 30-40 years.

West Side Civic Theatre put on a production of the play back in 2003, so maybe they’d be willing to put on another one in the near future at Shallowford Square. There are enough new folks around, myself included, that I think it would be a winner at the box office.  Oh, wait, West Side’s shows are free.  Okay, let’s just say you’d see plenty of lawn chairs in the Square that weekend.

Last note: You can read a preview of the play here at Google Books.

Over 20 Years of Bad Golf and Good Times

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Recently I got to go golfing with my old college roommate Robert Figuracion (Bobby or Fig to me and other old friends, Robert to those who met him after age 22).  We roomed together for many years while we were at George Mason, were in each others weddings along with our other roommate Tony Walsh, and Bobby and his wife Beth are largely responsible for Celeste and I finally deciding to move to Winston-Salem.  We’d always visited my family here, but when Bobby and Beth moved here from Northern Virginia and started telling us how much they loved it we finally started seriously contemplating the big move.

I’ve lived here for over three years and had only played golf once, at the soon to be demised Grandview course with my cousin Chris who affectionately called it "Goatview."  So Bobby took me out to Tanglewood and for $37 we got to play as many holes as we wanted to all day.  Actually the $37 got us an all day pass for the Championship course, but if we’d wanted to we could have just played the Reynolds course all day for $25. They’d just aerated the Reynolds course so we opted for the Championship course instead.  Whether you’re talking $37 or $25 you don’t see greens fees like that, with the cart included, at courses in the DC area.  We played the Championship in the morning, had some lunch, and then figured we might as well play Reynolds in the afternoon because I kind of wanted to see it and bumpy greens were something we could live with.  To be honest I thought the Reynolds course was more attractive, and it was definitely a damned-sight easier to play.  Real golfers would definitely prefer the Championship but to a duffer who’s there as much for the scenery as the golf the Reynolds course offers a lot.

At some point we got to reminiscing about the first time we’d golfed together.  It was in the spring the first year we were roommates and it was my first time golf outing ever.  We played on the Par 3 at Burke Lake Park and Bobby, who thinks I’m the luckiest human being alive, remembers clearly our first hole.  I hit my tee shot about 30 yards wide of the green and then crushed my second shot with a pitching wedge and it was going to fly the green by another 30 yards except the ball hit the flag stick and dropped six feet from the hole.  I think he was ready to walk off the course then and there.

Throughout our early and mid-20s Bobby and I played lots of the public courses in Northern Virginia, and at least once at Bryce Resort when my mom had a place there. We played enough that Bobby’s Christmas gift to me one year was a set of re-built clubs that he bought from a guy who rehabbed clubs in his basement.  They were honest-to-God wood drivers and I remember distinctly how blown away I was by the gift.  I also remember being pretty embarrassed about whatever lame gift I got him, but hopefully that’s water under the bridge.

Eventually kids and real jobs happened and we rarely got to play in the subsequent 12-15 years.  That made our Tanglewood outing a real joy to behold.  Bobby’s gotten a lot better in the years since we last played and I still hammer out the 120+ rounds with abandon.  Of course it really didn’t matter since the true purpose was just hanging out, shooting the breeze and trying not to lose more than half a dozen balls or kill any wildlife.  I’ve killed two geese with errant drives in the past.

We’ve promised to go out more often and Bobby mentioned Pudding Ridge.  To me it doesn’t matter where we play, but I’d like to go out soon so I can try and get in some practice before October 13.  That’s when my cousin Adam gets married and as part of the festivities I get to go golfing with my uncles and cousins who all somehow manage to shoot scores without triple digits.  However I don’t need an excuse to get out there again with Bobby; days like we had at Tanglewood are priceless and will be even more so if I can manage to shoot sub-100.  Of course that’ll be the day I’m ice skating in hell too.

Tee it up dude.

Justin on TV?

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Our youngest, Justin, attended the final session of his CSI course last night and was interviewed by a local TV station during the class.  When Celeste and I asked him which station it was he said he wasn’t sure.  He was more concerned with the fact that he’d missed 20 minutes of the class and was totally lost when he re-joined the group.  (They extracted DNA last night; how cool is that?)

This morning as Justin was getting ready for school I decided to try again.  I asked him what the person who interviewed him looked like.  "A guy with black hair," he said.  Now we were getting somewhere.  I asked him if it was just this guy or if there was someone else there to run the camera.  "He ran the camera, so it was just him," he said.  So I knew it probably wasn’t a reporter that I would recognize and odds were he wasn’t wearing a suit so maybe he was wearing a shirt with the station’s logo. I asked Justin if the guy was wearing a shirt with a logo on it and he says he can’t remember.  I ask him if the guy was wearing a suit and he says he can’t remember.  So pretty much I struck out.

Last night we watched as much of the local news as we could, including NBC, CBS, FOX and News Channel 14 (our local ABC affiliate doesn’t have their own news operation).  No sign of Justin.  This morning I flipped continuously between the four stations and thought I’d hit it when Channel 14 did a little teaser on a CSI program, but it ended up being about a bus run by UNC with a CSI "lab" on it that visits schools across the state and made a stop at Eastern Alamance High School.  Justin’s program was at Atkins High School so now I’m worried that he was interviewed for that story and his interview ended up on the "cutting room floor."  Hopefully not.  Another possibility is that the local station was actually the school’s in-house station, and if you think Justin would make the distinction between a "real" news station and the school station then you obviously don’t know my son.  The kid couldn’t care less.

Anyway, if you happen to be watching the local news and see an interview with a handsome, blond, 11 year old boy with a killer smile AND he’s talking about CSI then drop me a line and let me know where you saw it.

Is Something Going On at Jefferson Middle School?

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I heard from a parent of a child attending Jefferson Middle School that the school’s drama teacher has been suspended without pay and that the superintendent is recommending that the teacher be fired.  Anyone heard anything about this?  What I heard is that a letter was sent to all the Jefferson Middle School parents stating what I wrote in the first sentence, but no information was provided as to why the teacher was suspended.  Given what happened there last year I’d imagine some of the parents are a little jumpy.

What is Proper Bank Robbing Attire?

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Clemmonsbankrobber
I read this item about a bank robbery in Clemmons this morning because I was just by that bank yesterday.  In fact I go by that bank all the time so the story was bound to grab my attention.  What kept my attention was this paragraph from the story:

The culprit took an undisclosed amount of money. He was described as a
black man, about 5 feet, 6 inches to 5 feet, 9 inches tall. He was
wearing a blue bathrobe, and his face was covered, authorities said.

Talk about the ultimate in business casual!  In days past you could count on thieves to at least wear coveralls, some even with their name tag still stitched on the chest, but today’s Felonious Monks don’t even bother to get dressed. Truly our world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Nebraska State Senator Sues God

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In the "You Can’t Make This Stuff Up" category is the story of Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers (Democrat from Omaha) suing God and his followers in an attempt to get them to stop making terrorist threats.  From the Wired Threat Level Blog (found via Boing Boing):

The suit
(.pdf), filed in a Nebraska district court, contends that God, along
with his followers of all persuasions, "has made and continues to make
terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons." Those
threats are credible given God’s history, Chambers’ complaint says.

Chambers, in a fit of alliteration, also accuses God of causing
"fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes,
terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines,
devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like."

Likewise the suit accuses God of having his chroniclers "disseminate
in written form, said admissions, throughout the Earth in order to
inspire fear, dread, anxiety, terror and uncertainty, in order to
coerce obedience to Defendant’s will."

Take that ye proselytizers!  But wait…it gets better:

The senator also wants the court to issue a permanent injunction
prohibiting God from issuing plagues and terrorist threats. It’s
unclear how this could work since God is usually understood to be all
powerful.

Chambers does admit that God is omnipresent and omniscient, however.
Since God is everywhere, the Nebraska court has jurisdiction, Chambers
argues, and since God is all-knowing, Chambers need not serve him with
a notice of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit indicates that Chambers attempted to make God appear in
order to serve him by saying "Come out, come out, wherever you are,"
but the Almight declined, like many defendants, to make it easy for a
plaintiff to serve him with court papers.

In all fairness to Mr. Chambers the story points out that he’s trying to make a point that the state constitution allows lawsuits to be filed for any reason. 

Personally I think Mr. Chambers is also intent on providing us the best entertainment to come out of Omaha since Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Here’s a story line: Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler assisting God with a new ark as the next great flood  bears down on them in response to Mr. Chambers’ blasphemous lawsuit, or maybe it’s punishment for Chambers’ un-godly alliteration.  Either way, it’s a winner.

If you’re another child of the 70s check out the Wild Kingdom boys in action here.   Almost brings a nostalgic tear to my eye.