trends in art

Here you go! Here’s Tommy in the Smithsonian!

red, white, and dodger blue

Oh yes, a painting of Tommy Lasorda is going to hang in the National Portait Gallery. That’s the Smithsonian, folks.
I love Tommy. If it weren’t for the fact that my BIL had already named his son Tommy, after himself, I would have pushed seriously as a name for the Little Guy (I did give some consideration to the name Vin). This is lovely.

reading: the artful dodger

Yes, I’m finally getting around to reading Tommy Lasorda’s autobiography. It has a nice clever title, and is actually somewhat rare. We picked it up in a used bookstore somewhere, and I keep saying that I need to read it. This year, the team is doing so well and I’m so far away, I decided to read it. It’s a lot of fun. He clearly sat down with a tape recorder, rambled for a while, and then his ghost writer (whom he has the good grace to name on the cover) put it all together.
It’s fun, and funny, and a halfway decent book on leadership. But then, Tommy was coach most of my life, and I came to love him and the team at the same time.

more like it

I was getting a little stressed out, but last night was encouraging. There’s still hope — even Bill Plaschke seems to think so.

i’m never going to catch up on heroes at this rate

The Dodgers won tonight! two more, and we go to the series! and I watched the game (well, the second half of it) on TV!

Maybe I’ll get sick some time and do a Heroes marathon.

After October.

(2 October Edit: OK, we would play the Phillies or the Brewers next. I’m so old that I can remember when the World Series was before it started snowing on the Northeastern teams, and we didn’t have all this three divisions/ wildcard nonsense).

I can keep this up until October

The Dodgers are going to the playoffs! Hooray for Manny! Hooray for Joe! Hooray for nationally televised ballgames!

just in case you weren’t keeping track…

8 games and we go to the playoffs.
(yeah, yeah, tonight’s pitiful).

The Dodgers, who else?

mother’s day in the park

My DH asked me if I wanted Dodger dogs for my mother’s day dinner, so we got out tickets online and went on up to LA this afternoon. We ate our Dodger dogs, and our frozen lemonade — Miss Baby opened her mouth wide to beg for that, but didn’t come back for seconds. She was mellow throughout the game, leaning against mommy or daddy, watching the field. They gave our roses to the mothers, and she took mine from me in the first inning and didn’t let go of it until she fell asleep in the car on the way home. The Little Guy clearly recalled the game we went to last year: he demanded his Dodger dog the moment we sat down, clapped along and cheered at all the right moments. It was sunny and warm, but a nice breeze blew in, and we all relaxed and didn’t think about faculty meetings or colitis or i-coaster or clients or whatever worries Miss Baby cherishes.

We didn’t stay for the whole game; we left before the children exploded (so they never did). Of course I like 9-inning ballgames, but I like well-behaved children even more.

Now, this I will miss. I love baseball games, and will happily go to a ballgame anywhere, but Dodger Stadium is special. It’s a particularly comfortable park, beautifully situated, warm and familiar. When I was a child, we usually left after the 7th inning, in true local fashion. I even got to go to a World Series game, with my dad, in 77. When I moved back here, and before I got married, I went to baseball games all the time — I would go early to beat the traffic, take my cross-stitch, watch batting practice, chat with the folks around me. When my DH and I married, we were members of different denominations and different political parties, but we both backed the same baseball team. For a while there, he worked for a local TV station, and sometimes we got to use their season tickets, which were lovely, and we even had our anniversary dinner at the Stadium Club one year.

Oh, yes, there is another local team — more local, in fact. We almost never go to Angel stadium, though. I was raised to be a bit of a snob about the National League.

and we came all the way here for this

Yes, we are in San Francisco, travelling with Mammaw and Pappaw. And yes, Barry finally hit his ball.

woo-hoo.

The cover of a local paper had this headline: “Where would Barry be if he were still in Candlestick?”

I like their thinking.

well, there is good news…

The bad news is that the Dodgers lost tonight. The good news is that Barry didn’t get his homerun in our stadium. I don’t care if the Dodgers win or lose, even against the Hated Giants, just so long as Barry doesn’t get that run this weekend.