Saturday, August 21, 2004

Sticking It

Thanks, Olympics, for totally not checking with me first before crowning a new Ladies' Gymnastics All-Around Champion. You could have avoided a lot of trouble.

I have nothing against Carly Patterson, who was properly cute and victorious and all, but I am not yet ready to give up Mary Lou Retton. When you are seven, and you see somebody who could be your babysitter singlehandedly win the Cold War, you can't just let that go without international permission first having been obtained.

I knew what the outcome of the competition would be, and I couldn't bring myself to watch the whole thing, so perhaps it's best that I had been drinking. Mary Lou herself, I have heard, cheerfully called Carly to welcome her to the now two-woman club of American all-around Olympic champions. She's handling it better than I am.

Mary Lou is responsible for my imaginary gymnastics career, conducted between 1984 and 1989, in which I won four million Olympic gold medals, eighteen thousand national championships, and at least twenty-seven different Reebok endorsements. I begged incessantly for gymnastics lessons; my parents--recognizing that I had the flexibility of particle board and a warriors' spirit proudly displayed in soccer games by crying and flinging water bottles in the event of a loss--awarded me several parting gifts in the form of a replica U.S. gymnastics uniform, a mat, and the 75 RPM Fun Fit Mary Lou Retton Workout For Kids, random portions of which, with great patheticness, I can still perform ("Kick step, kick step, together, apart, together, and reach! Way to go!")

I have Friendboy Andy to thank for the drinking, and also my now-enormous ass. He did his patriotic duty by showing up right before the television coverage with a variety pack of malt beverages and two dozen Krispy Kremes. So in the small space of twenty years, I have traveled from gingerly executing pirouettes on the balance beam of the back of the living room couch to ruthless ingestion of Smirnoff and cholesterol bombs. Thus does the torch-dream of Olympic glory burn on.

Andy, however, does not share the emotional burden of having once, in desperation to be gymnastically discovered, begging a gym teacher to watch a plucky run down a set of hard mats in order to power a handspring that ended with a glorious backsided thud. (Approach and launch, I could handle; the whole issue of the splashdown would be Bela Karolyi's problem.)

I was very glad Andy was by my side to see me through this. I enjoy Andy's outlook on life, which may be summed up as his take on some web copy written by a seventeen-year-old: "I love the attempt to be literary, and yet the utter failure to actually do so." Andy does not know poop about womens' gymnastics and was thus in a far better position to mock it, but he knew enough to immediately discern that no matter what a gymnast did in the air, on the ground, or between the bars, she could be immediately destroyed by the misplacement of a pinky finger. "DEVASTATING, that was DEVASTATING," he yelled as a Chinese competitor executed a tiny hop on her beam dismount. "Her Olympics are OVER! There is no reason to go on! She might as well kill herself NOW, Tim!"

Once, during the 1988 Seoul Olympics, I saw an NBC commercial bumper that exactly matched the bars dismount of a Romanian gymnast with the closing notes of the Olympic theme. Dunt-dunt-duntduntdunt!! It has long been my ambition to star in a network promo exactly like this, and so, powered by the embers of my dreams of performing perfect vaults for the honor and glory of my nation and also generous amounts of peach Schnapps, I leapt out of my seat as soon as the same music cued up and executed a beautiful dismount from the futon, marred only by one baby toe sliding .000000001 millimeters to the left.

"DEATH AND DESTRUCTION OF A LIFELONG DREAM!!!!" Andy hollered as I collapsed, weeping.

I came roaring back Paul Hamm-style, however, with a gracefully executed leap to and from the bathroom, which delivered the sterling opportunity to show off my podium wave, perfected after many thousand medal ceremonies conducted at the top of my desk chair. Elbow, wrist, elbow, wrist; smile mistily to the far reaches of the crowd; unsuccessfully blink back tears of joy and exhaustion. It was my greatest triumph since my Olympic gold in Ladies' Figure Skating, obtained last Thursday by waving my arms in time to Carmen while rolling really fast around an empty parking lot.

Flowers rained upon the ice to: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

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