RITA III
So there are some things about the culture down here that drive me crazy.
One of the big ones in Baton Rouge, especially around LSU, is football. Football is a big deal here. Football is THE big deal here. When there is a game at Tiger Stadium here on Campus (right next to the building where the theatre department is) the entire campus basically shuts down. Just about every square yard of real-estate on campus is taken up by people in all sorts of sports team regalia, cooking, drinking, hoot-and-hollering, sitting in lawn chairs, etc. It’s called tailgating. I’ve seen it in other parts of the country, but never like this. People (private citizens) pull up with huge trailers emblazoned with the colors of their particular socially acceptable street-gang, they set up HUGE barbecue pits and have tents (some with air conditioning) so that they can sit in leather Lazee Boy recliners watching the game on large-screen televisions. All within earshot of the stadium. Coolers of every possible description stuffed with ice and really bad beer. It seems to be a game of seeing how much like being at home you can make being “at” the game.
I don’t even come close to understanding this. Admittedly I’m not a sports fan. Sports bars seem bizarre to me so tailgating is even stranger. The fact that it is done with such unbelievable gusto here is bewildering on a level that no oddity of Cajun culture even approaches. Mardi Gras I get. It’s stupid and inexplicable, but that’s obvious, and no one pretends that there’s anything more to it than inexplicable stupidity. What fun! And if nothing else, incredibly lavish, if tacky, floats eventually parade by, ridden by people in masks flinging plastic crap at you. What’s not to enjoy!
With tailgating there is the relationship to “the Game” that makes it all really strange to me. The tailgaters, don’t see the game unless they see it on TV. The closest thing to a parade is the little trucks that drive around collecting litter. People come to the same spot on campus, every game day, and have done so, in some cases, for generations. So there’s the tradition part of it. But there’s got to be better things to pass on than “this is were I always sit when the tigers play.”
Anyway, on game day. I go somewhere else.
The reason I bring this up is that classes at LSU were cancelled yesterday. The reason being that the clean-up from Hurricane Rita needed to happen. Of course what was actually going on, was that there was a football game (LSU vs Tennessee) scheduled for Saturday. This had to be postponed on account of the hurricane force winds during game time. It was played on Monday instead. Now there’s no way the NCAA would allow a school day to be called off because of a football game. On paper these people haven’t lost their minds. So Rita was the reason school was canceled so that we could turn the campus over to the game and the tailgaters.
This is something akin to invading Iraq because of 9-11.
Ok, so thousands of people didn’t die because they played football yesterday, but it’s not like the students didn’t get the message. Football is, in fact, the most important thing in life. It’s certainly more important than your education.
There has been some damage, but there’s no way we had to cancel classes. Not that I can see from the omniscient perspective afforded me.
Here’s the other thing. And people in this town have been noticing this a little. Because, thanks to Katrina, Tiger Stadium is now the home for not only LSU football, but Tulane and the NFL’s Saints (I don’t know if they can be from New Orleans any more) as well, there are all sorts of game days that have been added to the schedule. This means that all other events on campus (music, theatre, dance etc) scheduled for those days have to be cancelled. Now not only is there much communicated about an institutions values when they just schedule the game and let everyone else figure out their deals, but we all found out about these schedules by reading the paper! They didn’t even think to call and say, “Hey we need to make sure that these football games happen, and they are inherently more important than your play, so I’m sorry but that’s the way it goes.”
It’s not that football is more important than other cultural events… It’s that in the minds of these people the cultural events don’t even exist. So a woman called into the radio the other day and suggested that, for example, Operas be performed as half-time entertainment. “Bring the culture to the uncultured” She said… I think I actually let out a sigh that lasted 45 minutes.
Tulane and The Saints games must go on. But the shows that were scheduled to be in New Orleans… it’s just sad. Sad. But what can you do? It’s a disaster. Cancel football outright! That’s unthinkable.
I say, do the shows and let the football players run drills during intermission. Bring the popular entertainment to the snobs.
On a side note: Tiger stadium, in it’s present form, has it’s origins in the late great governor Huey Long. The Kingfish wanted a stadium for the Tigers, but he couldn’t get the money for it. So he got the funding to build some dormitories. These dorms happened to be arranged in such a way that if you put a football field in the middle of them and built some seating on top of them, presto chango, who-d a-thunk it! You’ve got a stadium. Now the interesting thing to me is that I actually like this story. I think it’s an example of creative thinking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blind to the many stupid things Long did, but this kind of graft seems fine to me.
I have to admit that football is important to many people who are smart and wise. I don’t, on balance, feel that there is anything at all wrong with football.
Tom has told me that for many first responders, working in emergency situations, the sense that normal life is going on outside of the disaster zone is incredibly important. To these people, hearing the score or seeing a bit of the game during a break can give them a sense that they are fighting a fight worth fighting. I don’t feel this way about sports myself (I would want to watch a Kubrick flick or the Simpsons) but I concede the point.
I just feel sad in my dark little corner trying to help nurse the flame in the flickering torch of artistic culture while the jocks are prancing around on the Jumbotron. It’s just that I know that if you fuel it, our light is brighter than theirs…
I am so with you on this Leon. It is further indication of priorities. Art is canned and sports are live. That is, we have music and film and tv as art now and that is the way so many people see it. There is a lack of exposure to live anything. Predigested news, predigested opinion, and by the looks of so many prepared meals in the market and passing for restaurants, predigested food too. Never forget the culinary arts which are dying as well except for faux knock-offs of what was trendy enough to make a magazine turned mass market.
But on the sports thing for responders, (and I loathe football) and you know this as well as me, being NYers and having been in NYC for 9/11, there is a great documentary that was made by HBO and has two things I love in it: NYC and the Yankees. It is called ‘Nine Innings from Ground Zero’. I watch this, and can’t help myself from watching it. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Though I was not a rescuer, I was in relief work at Ground Zero, or what we called “The Pile”. I remember what a huge difference it made to everyone that the series was being played. It is one of the more magical times in my memory. The world loved NYC and America and we could assume a leadership unknown before. We had support as Americans for what had happened to us. There was the World Series that made us all feel like kids again, any distraction where we could pile our emotions was a relief. This is before everything began to go so wrong with Iraq and everything else.
I am reminded of a bumpersticker I saw yesterday, one of my new favorites….”Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?”
This is not a disagreement– I certainly find it unreasonable that the department is forced to go black on so many weekends, but…
As someone who “gets” football and who has lots of contact with normal (at both the upper end and the lower end of the socio-economic scale)Baton Rougians, it makes so much sense. It is THE cultural event. Have you seen the t-shirts that say, “Baton Rouge. A drinking town with a footbal problem.” Football is what defines the culture of this town.
Now I understand, maybe football is not what you New York Yankees call culture, but in the South it is more than watching giants in tight clothes toss around the pig skin. It is about every citizen in a small town getting out of the house on a Friday night to sit in the very uncomfortable bleachers of a high school stadium to watch their son, or neighbor, or the cousin of a cousin, or even just the new high school star strive for victory. These wins and loses are palpable to these people.
And beyond that it is a time to catch up with neighbors and friends you haven’t seen all week because of working hard and taking care of the family. It is a time to let out all of that pain and frustration that is so unacceptible to release in a home or business situation. It is the time to be a part of something bigger than you are. To think that your cheers and boos can in fact change physics and rules and the nature of nature. In short it is everything that we get to experience as artists, and that we long for people to feel when they come to see a show (of course, we wish for some thought and action as well).
I often get tired of “theatre people” talking about how the audience isn’t there. If they would just come… Why don’t they get it… We, as artists, haven’t given it to them. We haven’t made the theatre something normal, something they need. When the world seems to be falling apart, football (and other sports) feels normal, feels good. It is our fault that theatre feels foreign, feels weird, feels like something we are required to do for a class that was supposed to be an easy A. It is our job to make theatre as necessary a part of our audiences life as football is.
Basically, get off the football fans backs, Leon, geez.
In response to Tara:
I don’t think you’re describing anything specific to the South. I think this is a positive (and may I say beautiful) way of expressing the way that sports function in not just American culture but much of world culture as well. I don’t have a problem with this at all. I think it’s wonderful.
However, as you well know, the football phenomenon at a place like LSU is a multi-million dollar corporate juggernaut, that is, in my view, using those small-town community warm and fuzzys to get very very rich. The reason, they are not going to stop has more to do with the bottom line than the need to provide a cultural function. The fact that it does in fact, in some cases serve that end is nice, but…
There is the series of fantasy books for children (by Finnish writer Tove Jansen) about a character named Moomintroll. In the book Moominsummer Madness a volcano causes a tsunami. There is a massive flood and the Moomin family takes refuge in a floating theatre, where they deal with the disaster by putting on a play.
This makes tremendous sense to me, cause as we’ve seen, stadiums don’t float, and I think it’s going to be awhile before we’re going to feel comfortable taking refuge in them.
Leon.
I do agree that the corporate goal is not to create communities.
But then our anger should be at the corporations and the universities who bow to their interests, not the guy and his family who tailgates every chance they get. They just feel like they are living the good life.
I’m not really angry at the tailgaters, I just don’t get it. They are welcome to their interpretation of “the good life” but they are also displacing other possibilities which just seems weird. If you say that it’s so much more important than everything else, then you don’t give consideration to other things that might want to coexist with it. It boils down to: Why can’t the Stadium be out in the middle of nowhere, instead of in the center of other activity.
Better yet, tailgate opening night of a play…
Leon.
…better yet, conspire with the team to turn a game into a version of some classic Greek or Shakespearean work. Scripted theatrics work for the WWF, why not college football?*
What a grand challenge it would be to incorporate a classic narrative into the rules and rituals of a corporate game.
There is precedent in changing the rules to fit some hidden agenda: Modern American football adopted a game rhythm conducive to television commercial breaks, as did sumo in Japan. What would you change, Leon, to bring a little Zeami to the Southeastern Conference? Referees signaling with foot stomps?
A less ambitious project would be to re-enact a game or an entire season on the stage. Has this been done? You would be guaranteed to fill the seats if the actual players and coaches agreed to show up on stage–give the undergraduates school credit and the good ones would see it as a way to prepare for media jobs or Hollywood later in life.
Tongue firmly in cheek,
Joel Ingulsrud
*Lot’s of reasons, actually, like coach and player careers being jeopardized by association with such a stunt.