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Experiencing the Super Bowl in my Backyard

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Friday night I stood huddled in a crowd of nearly 200,000 people waiting for a free concert on Georgia Street in Indianapolis, IN. I grew up only 20 minutes away. I've seen the Indy 500 crowd and the Formula One crowd but nothing compared to this. The Super Bowl in Indianapolis, my second hometown.

There's no way to describe how different the city felt. It's not like a hometown World Series, because there's really no team loyalty; although most Colts diehards remained Manning loyal. #gogiants trended in Indy for over a day. I guess the atmosphere was like this: if the 2011 World Series, Indy 500, and Stanley Cup Finals had a raging week-long kegger.

The North side of Indianapolis literally turned into Los Angeles for the week. Every conversation began with, "I heard so-and-so's staying down the street," and "I have an invite to such-and-such's party." Everywhere I turned there were people strolling around in sunglasses, like the Super Bowl spotlight was just too bright for their innocent little Hoosier eyes. The weather was warm for Indiana in February. People were dressed to the nines and everywhere, literally everywhere, had a waitlist.

If Indy's northern burbs became L.A., then The Super Bowl Village was mini-Vegas complete with a zip line, autographs, pop-up bars, and beer and beverages galore. During the day the village was family friendly-ish, but by night the village was the hottest club in town. Seriously. Hoosiers flocked to the circle to get a taste of the limelight and have that 'once in a lifetime' Super Bowl experience. Indiana even loosened its open container law for the entire week. Nobodies were getting into A-List parties-The entire social order of things was completely on its head, like the Super Bowl was a damn equalizer letting the super rich party with the average Joe.

I've never stood in a crowd so massive it shut down a city, I've never shopped along side celebrities, or been on ESPN, but I did it all at the Super Bowl. It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience to watch a city transform from an average up-and-coming town to a hip, ultra cool city over night.

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Feb 072012

Time Out

Every day we see on the news how our economy, our country, and our species is slipping.

We think globally and act locally. We adopt charities in Africa. We occupy Wall Street. We lift up the common man, worry for the middle and lower classes. And above all, we love resenting, and hating, the rich.

Then we rush together for the Super Bowl to celebrate the most ostentatious display of wealth, insensitivity and celebrity idolatry imaginable.

To me, the most glaring contradiction is nothing new to sports and media, just more obnoxious in these times -- having a major car manufacturer give a brand new sports car to the multi-millionaire who was just crowned a bigger multi-millionaire. While Detroit is running commercials during the same game that acknowledges, in words and pictures, the Super Real World of joblessness, foreclosures and suffering families in fallen cities, they follow up by giving a brand new sports car to the least needy person in the world. And we scream and cheer. (What?) Even Eli didn't care. Did you hear in the audio track, "Oh Eli, wait! You might want the keys!" Guess how many families could use the car Eli already forgot he had?

But this year's crowning irony were the two words at the end of Madonna's millenia-spanning spend-a-thon of enormous casts of dancers, soldiers, and cheerleaders jumping across moving sets of chariots, grandstands and marching Roman armies, navigating multiple stage transformations and the additional counter-celebrity who joined her. At the end, they present the phrase, "World Peace." (WHAT?)

If the Super Bowl was just the yearly ritual of rabid football fans who were loyal, captivated students of the games, I would have no problem with deserving football junkies spending whatever they want to express a love of the game, their passion, the moment.

But it's not a football event, it's a yearly American reaffirmation that no matter what we say in our self-righteous blogs, our political discussions, and twitter feeds to CNN, we really do love our celebrities, we do love that they are rich, we love mega-productions of epic scale, and we all secretly feel that if we raise a beer to the screen and scream that one day a year, even if we don't know a touchdown from a home run, we count too; I am a part of this bombastic show too; I am in the midstream of what matters most today; I'm part of what the my world is obsessing about right now. I can always return to my more-aware, more sophisticated, more critical self tomorrow, and remember that I hate suffering, and therefore the evil money empires that enable it.

But first, I want to find out how they got those monkeys into those suits! That was awesome!

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Experiencing the Super Bowl in my Backyard

Time Out