One Fine Night in Newton

LAST NIGHT, I went to a friend's house in Newton, Massachusetts and drank beer and ate lasagne and watched the Miss America Beauty Pageant and the third game of the Stanley Cup finals.

This is what you do when your exams are all over with.

This is what you do when your flight is four days away.

This is what you do when you don't have anything to do:

You go to a friend's house in Newton, Massachusetts and eat lasagne and drink beer and watch the Miss America Beauty Pageant and the third game of the Stanley Cup finals.

About the lasagne: It was cold. Leftovers. The very best kind.

About the beer: Miller. In a can. "The Champagne of Beers."

About the Miss America pageant: Well, all right...

The theme was "Americana" or something like that and the girls all dressed in skintight silver shake-your-stuff suits for a toe-tapping salute to George M. Cohan and for the evening gown competition each semi-finalist was escorted in a knockout dress beneath an archway of uplifted Naval Academy sabers and the cadets lucky enough to accompany the lovely ladies wore Good Humor Man ice-cream suits and Remedial Math dropjaw smiles like a bunch of meatheaded Varsity fullbacks strutting arm-in-arm with prospective Homecoming Queens and for the swimsuit competition the camera played fly-on-the-wall in the semi-finalists dressing room and a Miss America of yesteryear wandered from girl-to-girl like a queenbee in a honeycomb and the small-talk turned to silly superstitions.

"I keep a rabbit's foot!" Miss Somewhere said.

"I keep a small rock my boyfriend gave me!" Miss Somewhere Else said.

"My good luck charm is my family and they're all in the audience right now!" beamed Miss Illinois, throwing a high-intensity smile at the camera and giving her silky-as-corn-flax mane a confident toss over her naked left shoulder.

Of course no one stood a chance against Miss Texas. Who sat with the quiet assurance of a Born Champion in the corner of the dressing room. Who never once reached for the rouge nor deigned to muss her hair. Who kept her pretty hands folded in her tea-and-cookies lap and looked at the camera with the half-lidded eyes of a well-fed, well-bred, fine-tuned Siamese.

But these are the things you think of and write when Love has been beamed via-satellite to your friend's living room and the best you can do is consider graduate school in Texas or maybe lean over to, like, lick the TV screen.

But from the sublime to the sublime: The third game of the Stanley Cup finals.

It was the first real hockey game I'd ever seen if you don't count the time myself and four other guys rented a motel room in North Carolina on the way back to Boston from Spring Break for the express purpose of watching the Harvard hockey team barely lose the National Championship to the Michigan State Spartans who were a faster and bigger team (the announcer said) something like Rambo Meets Dorothy Hamill (the announcer said) but then I don't remember much else of the game because we had stopped in Macon, Georgia and bought several bottles of homemade Georgia Peach Wine which tasted a little like the juice from Libby's Canned Peaches spiked with Everclear grain alcohol and which we had drunk very quickly and with little regard for personal well-being which didn't keep any of us from shouting at the top of our lungs "Sieve! Sieve! Sssssieve!" whenever a Harvard shot-on-goal penetrated the Spartan line.

So the Stanley Cup match-up was the first real professional game I'd ever watched end-to-end (If you don't count occasional interruptions for the Miss America pageant) and maybe the most interesting thing I saw the whole game was a player from Calgary and Montreal "mixing-it-up" on the ice.

First, they threw off their gloves then off came those Friday the 13th facemasks and then they kind of started slugging each other over and over in the face. It lasted about a minute or so and the officials stood back with their arms across their chests and slightly maternal boys-will-be-boys frowns on their faces. When the players got tired of hitting one another they sort of did a slow dance on the ice and the crowd got real quiet and then they started slugging each other in the face again and the roar of the crowd welled up like a stock car engine at the Firecracker 500: rrroooAAARRRR! the crowd said. Just like that: rrroooAAARRR! Then the players were thrown in the penalty box and the camera showed them spitting up blood and looking like Hello-I-Eat-Reinforced-Steel-Bolts-For-Breakfast. It was actually a pretty entertaining fight and the players seemed to enjoy raising a ruckus so I tuned out the ESPN announcer who was pontificating about sportsmanslike conduct. A few minutes in the penalty box, I thought. A couple teeth. A little blood. The crowd likes it. The players like it. I like it...Everybody's happy!

So all in all it was a fine night in Newton, Massachusetts.

Beer. Pasta. Miss Texas. Bloodsports.

With no exams. Or papers. And a plane four days away.

Could any poor soul ask for anything more?