October 30 2021 Notes

 Happy Halloween People:

HOLLYWOOD: Tragedy on the Set

I didn't want to write about this last week because it seemed like the story was updating every two minutes. As you would expect when something like this happens, the shock and the sorrow, followed by finger pointing and CYA. 

The first thing I thought of was that it seemed as though the people who would normally be the first to go after him were either silent or even sympathetic to the veteran actor. Lord knows he's made plenty of enemies in his career, what with his big mouth and at times bad attitude. I've taken him to task myself at times. I've also called on the press to leave him alone, give him his space. 

And it seemed like they were. But it didn't last. 

I saw some lowlifes selling t-shirts making fun of the situation. I've seen the memes and the other things floating around social media. It's one thing to go after Baldwin, but a young innocent woman was killed for doing nothing more than her job. I feel bad for Baldwin, I feel worse for this poor victim and her family. 

That said, I can't help but wonder why on earth there was a loaded gun on the set in the first place. I mean we've been making movies for over 100 years, we've made movies about WWII and Vietnam, and managed not to have anyone get killed. Jeez, almost 30 years ago now, we were able to make it look like Tom Hanks was drinking Dr. Pepper with JFK, we have to have guns with live ammo on a movie set? 

It's just a tragic story that probably won't go away for a while and will only yield lawsuits and maybe even prosecutions, but what it won't produce is any answers or closure for anyone involved. 

I have no interest in the World Series, two teams I can't stand. So this week we'll discuss the World Series from 20 years ago instead....

BASEBALL: The Most Famous First Pitch.....

October 30, 2001. We were just 6 weeks removed from the worst attack on American Soil. Yankee Stadium was just a few miles away from where the Twin Towers had stood, a few miles from where they had been knocked down by terrorists. 

That night, the Yankees and Diamondbacks were getting ready to play Game 3 of the World Series. The first two games had been won by the D-backs in Phoenix. The big story that night though was that the President of the United States, George W. Bush was going to throw out the first pitch. 

There were some questioning the wisdom of this decision. Having gone through the extra security for the Mets-Braves game on September 21, I could only imagine how tight security would be for the World Series. And now the President was going to be in the park. That would only make it harder for the paying public.

And could you really guarantee the President's safety at that point? I mean, dealing with 60,000 fans already on edge because of what happened just weeks before was tough enough, but having the unthinkable just happened, was it really that far out to think someone would want to take a shot at the leader of the free world? 

This was all on my mind as I sat in our living room watching the game with my dad and my sister. If that wasn't enough, two of my best friends, were at the hospital, their first child about to be born. 

As I watched the President walk out to the mound that night, to a raucous ovation, I thought about how both my feelings and those of many of my fellow NY'ers had evolved towards George W. 

Al Gore had won our state by a large margin. We watched all the shenanigans in Florida almost a year prior with some degree of bewilderment and disgust. Hanging chads, dimpled chads, pregnant chads, all that crap. Whether you voted for Bush or for Gore, having the election decided by the Supreme Court shouldn't have sat well with anyone. It hadn't with me, but still I accepted it and figured I'd give the new guy a shot.

Not much happened the first few months after he was inaugurated either. Or more likely, maybe it did and I just wasn't paying that much attention. I remember the Chinese had gotten a hold of one of our airplanes, I remember Bush made a decision on stem-cell research, and I remember getting a check in the mail for a tax refund in the middle of August. I remember this because I came back from trip to New Orleans with not a whole lotta money left over.  And that was about the long and the short of it.

Till September 11, 2001.

It's sounds almost ridiculous now, but when I was with my co-workers at Conolly's Bar in Manhattan that day, and Bush came on the TV from Louisiana, I had almost forgotten what he sounded like. I was usually out and about when SNL was on, so I didn't even have Will Farrell as a reference. I really just didn't think about the Presidency that much for the first half of 2001.

But of course that day, he was the person we all needed to hear from.

And three days later, when he stood on the rubble next to FF Bob Beckwith and told the rescue workers, "I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon" well, I could be wrong, but I think NY got behind him real quick after that.

And now here he was, at Yankee Stadium, not at empty seat in the old ballpark, and millions watching at home. He got an ovation he probably never imagined he'd get in NY.

Now most people who get to throw out the first pitch at a ball game aren't ballplayers, or if they are, they are well past their prime ball players. So many of them stand at the front of the pitching mound while the catcher stands in front of home plate. Even at that, most of the time, the ball gets to the catcher on a bounce or two. 

President Bush actually went and threw a few warm up pitches near the indoor cages underneath the Stadium. Derek Jeter told him that he should throw the ball from the pitching rubber. So that's where he stood, and that's where he threw.

And he threw it right down the middle. 

Now, a decent hitter might have put a pitch like that on the subway tracks above Jerome Ave, but that wasn't the point. The point was that for a city and a country on edge, on a night where we felt bad things might happen, now that we knew they could happen, a man two months ago many New Yorkers either couldn't stand or could care less about, had stood on the mound at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, with the crowd cheering wildly for him, and at 55 years old threw a perfect pitch. What a way to show the the world that America was still up and running!

Oh, and about a half hour after Dubya's pitch, my man Brendan C. DePuy was born. He turned 20 this past Saturday. If he ever wants to see what was happening in NY that night, he can you tube up George W. Bush first pitch.