As the winter games wrap up, I had some thoughts I wanted to put down...

I’ve watched the Olympics over the years, and I may be missing something here.  Take the summer Olympics.  It was a competition between nations, originally.  Like war.  So, the original Greeks just turned what they did during war and turned it into a sport; throwing spears, hurling rocks, riding horses, running away, swimming from sinking ships.  It’s the winter Olympics where I lose the thread.  I mean, I understand something like the biathlon being based on Scandinavian fighting techniques but the rest of it looks like a series of bar bets and dares.

Take ice skating; sure, people think it’s the winter version of track and field, but think about the basic premise.  Two guys are looking at a village on the other side of a frozen lake.  The ice is slippery, so walking across it could be dangerous.  Naturally, one guy says, “Hey, instead of trying to walk across the ice, why don’t we strap knives to our shoes?”  And you know the second guy was drunk when he said, “Sure!” 

Even if you think of skating as a way to get around in winter time, who was the first person to think, “how about we start jumping around while we’re on the ice?”

“Oh, and maybe spin in circles?”

“Totally!”

And don’t get me started about the first guys who stood at the top of a mountain and figured the best way down was to tie planks to their feet and slide down.

Worse, the skeleton.  I used to ride a sled down the hill when it snowed but this sport seems to have taken all the wrong lessons from it.  And the name they came up for the sled is “skeleton”?  What’s that all about?  You know a bunch of Vikings were pillaging a village on top of a snowy hill and decided they had to get down and back to the boats fast, so they ripped the skeletons out of the bodies of their victims and rode those down.  It’s the only logical reason if you think about it.

And curling.  Yeah, we’re all watching curling ironically and it seems like the kind of sport you could play while downing a can of beer but answer me this: if curling is a winter Olympic sport, why isn’t shuffleboard or bocci ball a summer Olympic sport?  The winter Olympics need curling because there are only so many variations on winter sports.  You slide on something, we get it.  It’s winter, so you’ve immediately ruled out any water sports because the water is frozen.  And, frankly, most of the sports are mostly dependent on gravity as opposed to skill.  Do they involve some skill?  Maybe, like when you learn how to turn into a skid on an icy road.

In the end, I suppose we should enjoy these winter games because once climate change eliminates winter, we’ll miss them.  Probably.

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​Yeah, first off; it’s totally a concert.

The show begins…not with a full house.  About 5/8 of the theater is occupied.  With the balcony closed.  But people seem to be very excited to see the NYC debut of this band.  Then the realizations begin to pile up.

It’s an Austrian band.  Not Australian, Austrian.  Which maybe explains the name of the show; It probably sounded better in the original Austrian.  The lead singer, Monti Beton, looks like the American actor Robert Webber.  The surprise presence of European football (soccer) icon Johann Krankl is a big surprise because we’ve never heard of him.  And he played in the 80s.  Apparently he had a hit song in Europe after his soccer career and now fronts this band.

It’s going to be a trip through American’s song book, except they lost the book.  They kick it off with Elvis and that rockin’ number, “King Creole.”  Who opens up with “King Creole?”  Then, to change things up, one of Dean Martin’s Italian songs.  No, not “That’s Amore.”  A full song in Italian.  It seems the band is big in Italy, because they did like four more Italian songs.  Some Neil Simon, some Supremes, some Kinks.  Actually, a lot of The Kinks.  Krankl is a huge Kinks’ fan.  They tossed in a couple of Beatle songs late in the game (causing an audience member to blurt out loudly, “About time!”—like, what was she expecting??) Basically I felt like I was watching Austria’s greatest wedding band in action.

They had some of the crowd up on their feet.  A couple of ladies in front of me seemed to be watching the whole thing ironically, live-posting the whole show.

The band featured their two female back-up singers.  Their female percussionist sang lead a couple of times.  When the soccer player got a solo, the lead singer would dash around the band, joining in wherever he could.  And all the between song patter was heavily accented.

It was a bizarre show.  Like a Will Ferrell sketch, only sketchier.  They finished with the Beatles “All You Need is Love” and exited.  But the lights didn’t could up.  They then did a 3 song encore.  They took a band selfie with us in the background.

We left the show with goofy grins, all trying to sort out what we had just scene.  I mean, they weren’t awful, but they weren’t great.  And the tickets were free, which makes me wonder how many comps they had to hand out to semi-fill the house.  Not that I’d tell anyone to watch out for their show, but they apparently headed back home to Europe after this show.  I hope they left the plane running.

Staten Island is usually the butt of jokes.  I get it, Staten Island is the red rash on the bottom of Blue York City.  We were the final destination of the great white flight from Brooklyn.  We’re deeply blue-collar and red-hat.  And now, as the pandemic works its way into its third year, we’ve been the hot spot for embarrassing videos of mall-marchers and bar-busting protests about COVID quarantine.  I don’t know how this happened. Staten Island started on the right side of the pandemic.  The virus hit New York City hard.  Everyone knew someone who died.  The hospitals were overwhelmed.  As were the morgues; They were stacking bodies in refrigerator trucks like so-many fish sticks.  We saw the deaths. We saw the first responders being worked to their limits and beyond.  The sick kept coming. Only fools would deny that we had to take the pandemic seriously.

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but one of the first videos that went viral during the earliest days of the pandemic was from Staten Island.  And it was a video of angry people in a supermarket chasing a woman out of the store FOR NOT WEARING A MASK!  Yes, that was us.

Then came the fools.  And the politics. 

​Here we were, on the front lines of the plague but we were also waist-deep in Trumpism.  Once the twice-impeached, classified-document stealing, liar, fraud and FORMER NEW YORKER declared that the virus was a hoax and we could cure it with horse paste so that it would be gone by Easter because he cancelled some flights out of China, the mood in Staten Island started to shift.  Bars decided they didn’t want to be closed.  Restaurants-goers didn’t want to wear masks.  They didn’t trust the vaccines that Trump claimed credit for discovering.  It was a very confusing time.  But Staten Islanders did want they do best; blame the mayor and the governor. 

The new viral videos were now “protestors” invading food courts and declaring the pandemic over.  Their new news outlets were more than willing to support that worldview.  Masks were the new oppression and mandates their new obsession.  People literally told me they didn’t get the vaccine because (and I quote) they didn’t like “being told what to do.”  These were firefighters who are told to run into burning buildings, but the vaccine was where they drew the line.

So, in a land where traffic lights are ignored, stop signs are merely “suggestions” and turn signals are “none of your business” we can now add health mandates to the list of things that are oppressing us here in the county of COVID.