Yes, a tailgate can actually be too nice. A guy and a chair and a sub sandwich can be a tailgate, in many ways, that’s superior to a fancy tent with shiny people with bitchin’ hair … silver serving trays …tongs. A party begins.Ī tailgate doesn’t need to be big. An impulse meets another impulse, and off they go to nurture other impulses. The way others gush over Hawaii, or a Botticelli, or new countertops … that’s how I gush over tailgates. I swear, Miller could DJ the apocalypse and everyone would still have a pretty decent time. Meanwhile, my twisted buddy Miller (is that redundant?) creates play lists featuring Lou Bega, Marvin Gaye and Otis Day and the Knights. In preparation for a tailgate, I make lists for days - of marinades and meats to bring, of all the stuff to remember – “BLOODY MARY MIX!!!”
UCLA has called the stadium home since 1982. The majestic Rose Bowl stadium was designed in 1921 by the architect Myron Hunt, and it was built in 1922. Of all the sports, football most resembles kindergarten. You avoid the worst thing about parties: the long goodbye. You can plop buffalo horns on your head and fall to the ground, on your butt or your belly. But a tailgate party is different – the least-stuffy, most-spontaneous social event we know.Īt a tailgate party, you can dress any way you like, except nicely. Look, I’d rather put poodles up my nose than attend one more schmoozy cocktail party. At a venerable SoCal stadium, we play this one game with coins that I can’t even tell you about, it violates too many local ordinances, even in California, where laws are very fluid and no one’s been arrested in three years. These carpet-baggers can’t ruin our tailgates, that’s for sure. But what are you going to do, cry? Crying is for losers, as a big loser once said. It’s a shameless money grab, a prostitution of the soul. Outsiders are almost always exploitive, whether they’re hedge funds taking over newspapers or conferences swallowing other conferences. The collapse of the West Coast’s conference, the Pac-12, puts us at the mercy of squarefaced carpet-baggers from the Middle West. I try to prevent it.”Ĭhange baffles me – I seldom see the point. This reshuffling of the conferences troubles me, of course.Īs Ray Bradbury said, “I don’t try to describe the future. I like it less and less for the violence and more and more for what it does to us as human beings in need of play time. So here, we find fall in the bubbles of a keg, the winking reflection of the tubas, or the cartoonish way the poor bass drummer leans back, like Morganna the Kissing Bandit, to offset his overloaded shoulders. may be the only place that, in September, the sun gets even hotter, even as it gets lower in the sky. The ocean chills, the lifeguards go back to college. In L.A., the coming fall is more nuanced. In many regions, you can discover the changing seasons in the honking of passing geese or in the Technicolor of the trees. In the epistemic scheme of things, tailgates are one step away from a good food fight: smeary, excessive, decadent. There’s a playfulness to tailgates, an impish impunity. I love tailgates the way hippie girls love weed.
I love tailgate parties the way Wordsworth loved daffodils. Here’s to indelicate pagan rituals and socially insatiable friends, the Chardonnay Moms and their lumpy husbands, their kids, their pals, their dogs. Here’s to the tailgaters and their harvests. I mean, don’t harvests always mean something? Sadly, not anymore.īut we do have tailgates, thankfully. I wasn’t playing the lute exactly, but I was stutterstepping around with a fiery purpose, as you would to celebrate a harvest in olden times, back when harvests really meant something. I once set my shoe on fire at a tailgate party – not intentionally, yet it lent to the proceeding a Renaissance gusto. Now what do we have? Golf? Sudoku? Netflix? We’re evolving the other way. Yep, now.Īs you may remember, in the 17th century, every educated man could play the lute. I’ll tell you when sports fans are happy.
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