Rolling
So the bar magazine sent me to bowl with Miss DC last night, and afterwards I went home to write a Woody Allen-style comedy piece based on the experience, before turning it into Monica this morning. Of the 250+ words that she chopped out of this, most were similes, which is fine (they were a bit excessive). I just thought I would include my draft here without having to do another post:
Beauty and the Zen of Bowling
I am not good with really beautiful women. Talking with them often makes me do a classic flop-sweat like Johnny Cash, only without the guitar and black suits and actual songwriting ability. Ask me about it and I’ll inevitably flashback to that time in college when I asked out that model living in our dorm, and what should have been a suave query ended up ruined because I was jittery as bin Laden at an FDNY convention.
Today, though, I am recovering from both a Mongol of a virus and a festive and mildly felonious New Year’s, too drained to be unnerved by even the prospect of imminent nuclear attack. This is a good thing, because tonight I’m hanging out with Candace Allen, Miss District of Columbia USA 2006, and we’re going bowling.
Bowling, like songwriting, is not a skill I possess in my repertoire, unless you define it as ‘sending a 12-pound ball airborne in the general direction of the pins, likely giving any innocent bystanders a cranial contusion in the process.’ If this were the 1950s, I would be banned from the neighborhood bowling league, which would only be a positive, because I’m allergic to polyester shirts. Fortunately, we’re going to the new Lucky Strike in Chinatown, which is quite a bit swankier than the lanes your grandfather rolled on, in a retro-ironic sort of way.
Allen is pretty much everything you’d expect from someone who beat out 25 other women to become Miss DC: poised, articulate, intelligent, and beautiful. Mind-numbingly beautiful. She sums it up as the two of us walk over from the Metro: “I’m easy going; my friends say I’m laid back. It takes a lot to irritate me. I just like being around other people; I’m gregarious.” Which is probably why I’m not a sizzling bundle of nerves as we lace up our bowling shoes. The bowling shoes that Lucky Strike provides, just as an aside, are immaculate – in marked contrast to the footwear normally provided by bowling alleys, so diseased-looking that it would make a hypochondriac’s head explode.
Anyway. It was family that drew her into the pageant to begin with. “It was something I was motivated to do by my cousin, who was Miss Pennsylvania 2003,” says Allen, a Philadelphia native who is now a senior at Howard University, focusing on media law. “It was somewhat on a whim, and I was a bit nervous, but that drove me more.”
In April she’ll head up to Baltimore and face 50 new faces for the Miss USA title. Baltimore, with family close by, means she’ll have a cheering section. This is necessary, because while the contestants do their best to help each other out backstage, the competition itself can be tough. “You’re judged on personality. There’re a lot of tough questions. You have a one-on-one with the judges beforehand,” she says, adding. “There are people who don’t understand, that it’s more than just walking around in an evening gown.
“Though a girl does like to dress up, whether she admits it or not.”
Allen, just as another aside, has an iPod filled with everything except country, although she does make exceptions for some cowboy music. She has a small tattoo on her wrist and a diamond ring on her right hand.
We start to bowl. She favors a coral-pink ball. I grab pretty much anything heavy enough whose holes won’t pull my fingers out of their sockets, and through massive effort manage to keep the ball on the ground. The screen above our heads helpfully provides, in addition to the score, a little window showing how fast our ball is moving when it hits the pins. Allen rolls between 11.2 and 13.4 miles per hour.
The last time she played was at a charity bowl for the homeless, where “we didn’t keep score, but I had more strikes than this.” Indeed, volunteer work has always been a big part of her life: tutoring kids at elementary schools throughout the District, even a gig as a candy striper. “My main thing now is working with children, tutoring in an after-school program. Right now it’s pre-K; it’s wild but it’s fun,” she says. “Just reading to them and helping with homework. More people should volunteer – they don’t realize the satisfaction they’ll get out of it.”
If she weren’t so nice, she’d probably be getting satisfaction out of whaling me at this moment.
Allen rolls with what a purist would likely call a classic form: windup, aim, release, and follow-through, in one graceful, arching movement. At first her ball keeps curving left, but then she corrects; her scorecard begins to read like a New York phone number: 9-1-7-9-9-3-7-7-6-9… Meanwhile I hold my own with the occasional strike. I do not mind. At the end of the first game, she leads me by five points.
The last time I went to a bowling alley was on an insomniac summer night in Chicago, an old-school West Side place filled with old wood and cigarette smoke and bad intentions. If you want to see the textbook definition of ‘dysfunctional,’ I give you some of the people chain-smoking and rolling in a place like that at three in the morning. But most bowling alleys these days, in a bid to attract what marketing directors expansively refer to as the ’18-to-25 demographic,’ now resemble the interiors of UFOs. Lasers rake the ceiling; black light casts everything in alien hues; music videos flash and gyrate on big screens over the lanes.
Lucky Strike doesn’t fall into either of those extremes. The décor is tasteful and expensive, about what you’d expect around the MCI Center, an area that under Abe Pollin’s wrinkled but iron grip is starting to look like Times Square’s bastard lovechild. There are screens over the bowling lanes, and they play silent clips from movies – Bill Murray going wild near the end of ‘Kingpin,’ Christina Ricci and Vincent Gallo fighting in a photo booth in ‘Buffalo 66,’ among others – alternating with still shots of abstract art. There are couches and tables that look like they belong in a club, recessed lighting, and pool tables in the back.
Because this article is for the February issue of OnTap, devoted in a large part to Valentine’s Day stuff, I ask Allen her thoughts on Lucky Strike as a date spot. I also do this because she’s just rolled a strike, nearly terminating my narrow lead with extreme prejudice, and I feel the urgent need to throw in a distraction.
“[The place] is good,” she says. “It has food. Entertainment. It’s a little loud. It’d be a good place for a first date, because you’re out there doing something.” And that’s important. “As a first date, movies aren’t any fun, because there’s no interaction.”
Ladies and gentlemen, take note.
At that moment she winds up. Aims. Sends her arm sweeping back – and the ball goes flying backwards, where it bounces once and rolls to a stop against the couch where I’m sitting, taking notes. No harm; it doesn’t smack the large group of poets who have, incongruously enough, decided to use a bowling alley for a reading, and who more to the point have taken over our couch. How anyone can analyze iambic pentameter while “Stuck in the Middle with You” blasts on the speakers is beyond normal comprehension.
“I’ll try not to kill anybody this time,” she says, taking up her favorite ball again, and rolls. Pins scatter with a resounding boom. Strike. Vindication.
With one game left, the score on the screen says ‘Candace: 339 / Nick: 333.’ But I am coming back, just like Jesus. Rolling that 12-pounder right down the center, just like the Big Lebowski. The scores are staying close. I roll. Allen and I have developed a shtick that revolves around memorizing a positive outcome as the ball streaks toward its target: strikes, splits, pins flying. It’s seemed to work so far. I concentrate. I am but a monk in the Temple of Rolling, intensely focused. The ball goes straight … at 15.2 miles an hour … straight … starts to curve, and (oh crap) whispers by the leftmost pin and flops into the gutter. Three lanes away, meanwhile, a little kid totters with a ball the size of his whole upper body and scores a strike. My irrational jealousy at him knows no bounds.
Allen wins, which is exactly the way it should be. She is happy about this fact. In another two months she’ll head for the Miss USA pageant, and there’s a solid chance she’ll earn the crown, because she has personality and beauty to spare, but for the moment she has another victory to pump a fist about: kicking ass at bowling.
January 2006
Beauty and the Zen of Bowling
I am not good with really beautiful women. Talking with them often makes me do a classic flop-sweat like Johnny Cash, only without the guitar and black suits and actual songwriting ability. Ask me about it and I’ll inevitably flashback to that time in college when I asked out that model living in our dorm, and what should have been a suave query ended up ruined because I was jittery as bin Laden at an FDNY convention.
Today, though, I am recovering from both a Mongol of a virus and a festive and mildly felonious New Year’s, too drained to be unnerved by even the prospect of imminent nuclear attack. This is a good thing, because tonight I’m hanging out with Candace Allen, Miss District of Columbia USA 2006, and we’re going bowling.
Bowling, like songwriting, is not a skill I possess in my repertoire, unless you define it as ‘sending a 12-pound ball airborne in the general direction of the pins, likely giving any innocent bystanders a cranial contusion in the process.’ If this were the 1950s, I would be banned from the neighborhood bowling league, which would only be a positive, because I’m allergic to polyester shirts. Fortunately, we’re going to the new Lucky Strike in Chinatown, which is quite a bit swankier than the lanes your grandfather rolled on, in a retro-ironic sort of way.
Allen is pretty much everything you’d expect from someone who beat out 25 other women to become Miss DC: poised, articulate, intelligent, and beautiful. Mind-numbingly beautiful. She sums it up as the two of us walk over from the Metro: “I’m easy going; my friends say I’m laid back. It takes a lot to irritate me. I just like being around other people; I’m gregarious.” Which is probably why I’m not a sizzling bundle of nerves as we lace up our bowling shoes. The bowling shoes that Lucky Strike provides, just as an aside, are immaculate – in marked contrast to the footwear normally provided by bowling alleys, so diseased-looking that it would make a hypochondriac’s head explode.
Anyway. It was family that drew her into the pageant to begin with. “It was something I was motivated to do by my cousin, who was Miss Pennsylvania 2003,” says Allen, a Philadelphia native who is now a senior at Howard University, focusing on media law. “It was somewhat on a whim, and I was a bit nervous, but that drove me more.”
In April she’ll head up to Baltimore and face 50 new faces for the Miss USA title. Baltimore, with family close by, means she’ll have a cheering section. This is necessary, because while the contestants do their best to help each other out backstage, the competition itself can be tough. “You’re judged on personality. There’re a lot of tough questions. You have a one-on-one with the judges beforehand,” she says, adding. “There are people who don’t understand, that it’s more than just walking around in an evening gown.
“Though a girl does like to dress up, whether she admits it or not.”
Allen, just as another aside, has an iPod filled with everything except country, although she does make exceptions for some cowboy music. She has a small tattoo on her wrist and a diamond ring on her right hand.
We start to bowl. She favors a coral-pink ball. I grab pretty much anything heavy enough whose holes won’t pull my fingers out of their sockets, and through massive effort manage to keep the ball on the ground. The screen above our heads helpfully provides, in addition to the score, a little window showing how fast our ball is moving when it hits the pins. Allen rolls between 11.2 and 13.4 miles per hour.
The last time she played was at a charity bowl for the homeless, where “we didn’t keep score, but I had more strikes than this.” Indeed, volunteer work has always been a big part of her life: tutoring kids at elementary schools throughout the District, even a gig as a candy striper. “My main thing now is working with children, tutoring in an after-school program. Right now it’s pre-K; it’s wild but it’s fun,” she says. “Just reading to them and helping with homework. More people should volunteer – they don’t realize the satisfaction they’ll get out of it.”
If she weren’t so nice, she’d probably be getting satisfaction out of whaling me at this moment.
Allen rolls with what a purist would likely call a classic form: windup, aim, release, and follow-through, in one graceful, arching movement. At first her ball keeps curving left, but then she corrects; her scorecard begins to read like a New York phone number: 9-1-7-9-9-3-7-7-6-9… Meanwhile I hold my own with the occasional strike. I do not mind. At the end of the first game, she leads me by five points.
The last time I went to a bowling alley was on an insomniac summer night in Chicago, an old-school West Side place filled with old wood and cigarette smoke and bad intentions. If you want to see the textbook definition of ‘dysfunctional,’ I give you some of the people chain-smoking and rolling in a place like that at three in the morning. But most bowling alleys these days, in a bid to attract what marketing directors expansively refer to as the ’18-to-25 demographic,’ now resemble the interiors of UFOs. Lasers rake the ceiling; black light casts everything in alien hues; music videos flash and gyrate on big screens over the lanes.
Lucky Strike doesn’t fall into either of those extremes. The décor is tasteful and expensive, about what you’d expect around the MCI Center, an area that under Abe Pollin’s wrinkled but iron grip is starting to look like Times Square’s bastard lovechild. There are screens over the bowling lanes, and they play silent clips from movies – Bill Murray going wild near the end of ‘Kingpin,’ Christina Ricci and Vincent Gallo fighting in a photo booth in ‘Buffalo 66,’ among others – alternating with still shots of abstract art. There are couches and tables that look like they belong in a club, recessed lighting, and pool tables in the back.
Because this article is for the February issue of OnTap, devoted in a large part to Valentine’s Day stuff, I ask Allen her thoughts on Lucky Strike as a date spot. I also do this because she’s just rolled a strike, nearly terminating my narrow lead with extreme prejudice, and I feel the urgent need to throw in a distraction.
“[The place] is good,” she says. “It has food. Entertainment. It’s a little loud. It’d be a good place for a first date, because you’re out there doing something.” And that’s important. “As a first date, movies aren’t any fun, because there’s no interaction.”
Ladies and gentlemen, take note.
At that moment she winds up. Aims. Sends her arm sweeping back – and the ball goes flying backwards, where it bounces once and rolls to a stop against the couch where I’m sitting, taking notes. No harm; it doesn’t smack the large group of poets who have, incongruously enough, decided to use a bowling alley for a reading, and who more to the point have taken over our couch. How anyone can analyze iambic pentameter while “Stuck in the Middle with You” blasts on the speakers is beyond normal comprehension.
“I’ll try not to kill anybody this time,” she says, taking up her favorite ball again, and rolls. Pins scatter with a resounding boom. Strike. Vindication.
With one game left, the score on the screen says ‘Candace: 339 / Nick: 333.’ But I am coming back, just like Jesus. Rolling that 12-pounder right down the center, just like the Big Lebowski. The scores are staying close. I roll. Allen and I have developed a shtick that revolves around memorizing a positive outcome as the ball streaks toward its target: strikes, splits, pins flying. It’s seemed to work so far. I concentrate. I am but a monk in the Temple of Rolling, intensely focused. The ball goes straight … at 15.2 miles an hour … straight … starts to curve, and (oh crap) whispers by the leftmost pin and flops into the gutter. Three lanes away, meanwhile, a little kid totters with a ball the size of his whole upper body and scores a strike. My irrational jealousy at him knows no bounds.
Allen wins, which is exactly the way it should be. She is happy about this fact. In another two months she’ll head for the Miss USA pageant, and there’s a solid chance she’ll earn the crown, because she has personality and beauty to spare, but for the moment she has another victory to pump a fist about: kicking ass at bowling.
January 2006
posted by NiK @ 2:31 PM
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