Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2008 > February > 04 > Entry
Super socializing during Super Bowl
Made-up holidays are cherished by Americans as much as their traditional or official ones.
Customary Epiphany (Jan. 6), once a major stop on the ecclesiastical calendar, passed this year with barely a blip. Designated by law, Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Jan. 21) was, rightly, more solemn than celebratory, also an excuse for a three-day weekend for some workers, but still too new to have developed a distinctly festive culture.
That leaves Super Bowl Sunday, a manufactured event with a shamelessly commercial function, as the year’s first fully anticipated and ceremonious holiday, and one not in danger of cancellation by the writers’ strike.
A mostly Patriotic crowd gathered at the Cedar Door downtown to watch the N.Y. Giants poison Boston’s perfect season.
Petra Dizdar, Brendan Starr, Audry Ley, Lea Markovick
“It’s an excuse for a party,” said Eli Catalan, an art director for A3 Design and totally disinterested in the game itself. “I came for the pretty girls, the food and the out of doors.”
Jane Martin, Erika Martin, Kate Millea, Melissa Shook
In fact, several of the celebrants, including devoted fans of each team, cited the clement weather as a reason to join strangers on the deck of the peregrinating Door.
“You can’t do this where we come from,” said Montanans Tracy and Heather Havens.
“Not without winter coats,” said Melissa Shook, a transplanted New Yorker and therefore a Giants fan among Bostonians Jane and Erika Martin and Massachusetts-born Kate Millea.
Tracy Havens, Heather Havens
The Martins had only just arrived in town, checked into the Hampton Suites and raced to the nearest game-watching post. Colorado techies Kyle Graver and Greg Pring, in town for business, were also staying in nearby hotels.
“It gives you something to look forward to,” said Graver, who favored the Giants, and claimed the team for Pring, who said he actually “couldn’t care less.”
“We liked the idea of $2 appetizers,” said Linda Ley about her posse’s choice of the Cedar Door. “And we don’t have to clean up,” added her companion Lea Markovik.
Ley was forthright about Super Bowl Sunday as a holiday: “It’s a good drinking day.”
“You feel the game if you’re with a lot of people,” said Ernesto Fraga, who split allegiences with his wife Claudia. “Sure it’s a holiday for us. But every day’s a holiday.”
Now there’s a response designed to appear in Out & About.
On a personal note, my Super Bowl Sunday was a bit frazzled because the previous two nights were devoted to the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event to benefit Project Transitions. Our team of seven hosts, led by the American-Statesman’s Dale Rice, prepared an 11-course sit-down meal of Latin American and Texan dishes, accompanied by 20 varieties of wine, for 18 diners. Nine hours of marketing and prep work on Friday, followed by nine hours of cooking, serving and entertaining at the gorgeous Old West Austin house of Robert Mayott and Nick Shumway. I’ll leave it to other columnists present to describe the experience in detail, but your correspondent enjoyed himself just a little too much. Not a good idea for somebody with two big events the next day and an out-of-town guest on the way.
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