This past weekend I was in Washington, DC for a softball tournament. My team went last year and it was a lot of fun (not to mention perfect weather). This year, I went with another team from our league as mine decided not to go this year. Still, I thought I might have even more fun since some friends from out of town were also going to be there, playing in the Gay Bowl IX flag football championship tournament.
Unfortunately, overall things didn't go so well. While Friday was a spectacular day, with temperatures in the 80s, a cold front past through that night. Saturday morning, when we started playing, it was not only cooler, but rather windy with intermittent rain at times. It was rather uncomfortable. To make things worse, both times I got to pitch I was utter crap, and our team lost all three games we played. The first two, in the round-robin portion, were completely lopsided disasters. The score of the third game, our first in the double-elimination round, was 18-13 but to me it didn't seem that close.
This meant that our Sunday game was set for 8 a.m. It was under 50 degrees. Not as bad as the weather the Phillies had to put up with in Denver, but then again we're not paid millions of dollars. We had to win in order to stave off elimination. I pitched a lot better, and it was a closer game, but we still lost.
As for the off-the-field stuff, on Friday night the host bar was not easy to find, and after registering for the tournament it got so crowded that I was extremely uncomfortable. I don't like bars much to begin with, especially if I'm by myself. Even though I was there with some of my teammates I got out of there early and went back to the hotel.
The host bar Saturday, on the other hand, didn't get very crowded at all while I was there. There was supposed to be a jockstrap contest but it was canceled because they had no entrants. From what I heard it got busy later, but by that time I was long gone. I was tired from being up early and had to get up even earlier Sunday, so it was back to the hotel early again. At least the Phillies-Rockies game was called off so I didn't have to stay up to watch it.
Sunday, after our game ended we went back to the hotel, which was in New Carrollton, Maryland (the two parks where the softball fields were located were out there). It had a shopping center on its grounds that had an IHOP, so we had breakfast there. (It also had a Five Guys Burgers & Fries, and I am deeply in love with their food, but I didn't get a chance to partake.) After showering and changing I decided to go into DC and watch the final games in the flag football tournament, and kinda-sorta dragged my teammate Kurt along, since he didn't want to stay in the hotel room by himself. We took the Metro downtown and were supposed to take a bus from there to get to the park. Then I decided I didn't want to go there, and we went to the ESPN Zone thinking we could watch the NFL games. It was way too crowded at the bar and there was a line to be seated at a table.
We ended up meeting Shane, one of our teammates on our regular softball team, who was playing for the Philly team in the flag football tourney. They were eliminated earlier in the day. We tagged along with him, going to the Capitol for the National Equality March (which was well under way by that time; they had already started the rally on the Capitol steps when we got there). That meant a fair amount of additional walking, so my feet were really, really sore.
I was ambivalent about this march. I feel like the whole marching-in-DC thing has been done so often by so many different groups that it's almost a cliche, and I don't know how much of an impact it had. I feel like it would have been better to march on a place like Salt Lake City. And some of the speakers we heard were very strident. They were so angry (not that I blame people for being angry with what's going on in this country) that the messages they were trying to send got lost in their anger.
Some of the speeches were worth hearing, though. NAACP chairman Julian Bond made many excellent points. And we actually got to hear (not see, as we were way in the back; I barely could see the video monitor) the one and only Lady Gaga.
As we were walking towards the Capitol there was a small stream of people headed in the opposite direction; after Lady Gaga spoke that stream picked up some intensity. She didn't sing, however, and that disappointed some people, especially after an interpretation of "America The Beautiful" by Billie Myers that was lacking.
Kurt and I had dinner with Shane and a few of his football teammates, and then went back to our hotel. (Three nights in a row in the hotel early for me! I'm so lame!) Monday I took Amtrak home.
So, to sum up: losing softball, poor pitching, not so great weather (not awful, but not the best), no real drinking fun, aching feet. The biggest disappointment was that I didn't get to see my friends from out of town who were playing flag football. I was really looking forward to getting together, but for various reasons it didn't happen.
Still, it wasn't all bad. The team I played with, the Mt. Airy Family Practice Shots, was a fun group. Their tradition is to give the guys on their team girls' names, and give the girls boys' names. I was dubbed "Jill." I'm not sure why. At least I made out better than Kurt, who was assigned "Eunice."
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