Reaching the Dyke Quotient

I volunteer with the Young Storytellers Program. For you faithful readers, I have described it before as being one of the greatest things I have ever done...we help kids write plays and get actors to perform their pieces for them. Anyway, school is out for summer, and the mentors are antsy.

We decided to join in a softball league.

Now, I've played ball on and off for 13 years now. I've played slow and fast pitch softball and baseball. I play center field, but can manage at third and pride myself on being intimidating because of the "I will kill you dead" look that fastens itself to my face when on the field. I have never been a fast runner, but I try for all I'm worth and count on my long legs to make up for what my muscle lacks in speed. I feel like I've seen lots of teams and lots of players, and nothing really surprises me.

This league, however, takes the cake. Nothing can be normal in Hollywood. We're playing against major management companies and agencies, like William Morris, Creative Artists Agency, ICM, Disney, the Hollywood Reporter, and Variety. My heckling consists of taunts like, "THAT'LL teach you to give Episode 3 a bad review!" and "Should have gotten a pay or play deal for Val Kilmer, huh?"

And the other cool part? I am playing with some celebritites...although there's only one I care about. NITRO, from American Gladiators. I watched the hell out of that show when I was younger, and he was one of my favorite gladiators. Now, he's my favorite first baseman.

I want to go back to, say, 1992 on a Saturday night while I'm up late watching the re-run of the show. I want to lean down in little HellCat's ear and whisper, "In 13 years, you'll be patting Nitro's behind and joking around about pulled muscles...and you'll be playing softball, too." I don't think little HellCat would believe me.

The best part is that Dan is a really nice guy (AND he uses the bat named "The Nitro"). Everyone else is sweet, too. This league is very dissimilar to the last baseball league I played in, where we were the badasses and took it a little TOO seriously.

We were the Taos Corndogs, and our arch enemies were the 21st street Mortherfuckers ("We were too busy fucking your mother to practice"). The Motherfuckers were all dirty hippies, and played without shoes and sometimes without gloves. If you took your eyes away from the game for a second, you might miss one of the outfielders stripping down to their bare behinds and doing a little hippie dance. And the best part was that they really DID smell like patchouli and corn chips, so our taunts were funny AND true.

I'm glad this league isn't like that. So far, we're slaughtering the competition, but we're doing it the classy way.

Is it wrong of me to want Dan to show up in his red white and blue wrestling leotard?

snug. g