Uncaged

My Amtrak Bonus points jumped up to 3600 points with another trip to New York. That’s hardly enough points to pay for a dessert at Applebee’s, but, it shows me that I’ve taken a lot of trips since I left New York. Ironically, most of them have been to New York, but at least I’m moving around and more active now.

I arrived in New York on Friday and stayed at Brother X’s house. We watched a little TV and trash talked on the commercials. We’re both getting ready for the Rage in the Cage Match set up for May 16^th in Lancaster, so we were ragging each other on how poorly we thought each other could hit a baseball. Finally, when the Yankee game was still tied in the umpteenth inning, we decided to call it a night, but get up early in the morning and head to the batting cage in Hicksville, so we could get a chance to “scout the other team.”

The next morning, we woke up bright an early and headed to the batting cage. Normally, I never wake up early, preferring to ease out of bed at the crack of noon. But this day was different. We had an adventure planned. It was like a day when we had a scout trip planned as kids. Mom could barely get us out of bed on a school day, but we would jump up before dawn on those days when we had an adventure planned.

There were only two kids using the cages. They were brothers 10 and 8-years old, two years apart, just like Brother X and myself. They were just as competitive, too. The owner of the place came over to watch us all complete, and he told the boys that in 50 years they would probably be just like us. They left right after he said that.

We started hitting against the slowest machine that was set to throw the ball at 35 mph. Before too long we each were hitting the ball most of the time, so we kept moving up to higher speeds. (After all, we now had the whole place to ourselves.) We moved quickly from 40 to 50 to 60, and then when we faced the machine that was throwing at 70 mph we were missing more than we were hitting. After that I took a few swings against the 80 mph machine, but had little success. Neither of us even tried to hit against the 90 mph machine. Like Clint Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Some people don’t seem to have any limitations, though. On Saturday afternoon, we went to see an Off Broadway production of my friend Marianne Driscoll’s second play. The first show, McGoldrick’s Thread was an award-winning, smash musical that ran for an entire month at St. Mark’s Theatre. This, her second play, is currently at the Cell on West 23^rd Street. It’s called The Biscuit Club, and the actors all play various dogs in a kennel. One night while Gus the owner is away from the kennel, Chester, the old resident dog, is talked into letting them all out of their cages for a little while. When the dogs are uncaged, the fun really begins. Congratulations to Marianne, cast, and crew. The show is a real treat.

http://www.thecelltheatre.org/events/2015/4/9/the-biscuit-club

Peace & Love, and all of the above,

Earl