I have to admit that I am one of the people who watches the Super Bowl just for the commercials. When the Browns make it, I will watch it for the game. Having been raised in St. Joseph, Mo., even the Kansas City Chiefs would keep me in front of the TV instead of at the nacho bar during a third-down conversion.
But this year, I will be forgoing the game and the commercials altogether, having read that some advertisers have drawn up political plays in their game day commercial plan.
Can someone please just call an offensive foul on that one? How about a defensive foul?
Aren’t sports supposed to bring us together, unless you’re a couple and one of you is from Cleveland and the other is from Pittsburgh? That’s like the marriage of James Carville and Mary Matalin. I don’t get it. I never have and I never will.
It seems like the NFL has become politicized, with some players refusing to stand for the national anthem and others walking out onto the field with a “hands up, don’t shoot” posture. But I don’t believe those actions provoked the firestorm that politics have been of late, so why must politics enter the Super Bowl commercials?
My sister called the other day to inquire about our other sister and before you know it, she and I were engaged in a heated exchange about Michelle and Melania, two women who never ran for president yet find themselves the victims of deeply personal attacks over what they wear (or don’t wear), how they look or how they speak.
Personally, I can only speak English and a few lines of Spanish, which translated include “meatballs, didn’t I tell you?” and “give me a hot kiss.” So if I were still on television, I wouldn’t exclude the new first lady from my show because she “can’t speak English.”
I won’t go to Taco Bell with my sister for fear that ordering a Burrito Supreme might trigger a verbal brawl about the Supreme Court’s new nominee, or Hobby Lobby and women’s reproductive rights. “I just want a Burrito Supreme with extra hot sauce please!”
Brawls and near brawls are happening more frequently, too, it seems.
On Election Day I pulled into a grocery store parking lot and my car alarm suddenly went off, and I couldn’t get it to shut off. The alarm and the radio blared loudly while the headlights flashed and the windshield wipers went swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.
I jumped out and aimed the key remote directly at the car and pressed the unlock button. When that didn’t work I pressed it harder, unaware that a crowd was growing around me.
A handsome young man with a crazed look in his eye ran up and asked what was going on. As I explained, the alarm seemed to grow louder and he wrestled those keys right out of my hand.
When his attempts proved futile, I grabbed the keys back out of his clenched fist and pulled the keyless remote apart revealing the key, which I then inserted into the door.
For the first time in what seemed an eternity, a silence settled on that parking lot and the crazed looks departed from both my face and the young man’s eyes.
The stillness was broken only by his words: “Oh, this really is your car. I thought you were trying to steal it and I told all those women over there to stand back, things were about to get real.”
“Get real? For real?? You thought I was stealing my own car?”
“Well, you never know in this day and age and you looked kind of crazy.”
I thanked him for his “help” and hoped that I would never see him again, but I would: Inside the store, when about a half-dozen plastic cartons of arugula came sliding off the top shelf and onto my head, and then again in the bread aisle where my box (because I didn’t have a cart) fell apart and all my groceries came crashing to the floor.
As I was gathering them, I looked up to see a pair of legs in front of me, and of course they belonged to none other than the Parking Lot Sheriff.
“I can help you with that. I feel bad that I thought you were a car thief.”
“That’s OK. I’d really appreciate the help. Normally things like this don’t happen to me. Well, yes they do. Just not all at once.”
And just then, a woman came up and said “Aren’t you Robin Swoboda?” I winced and said yes.
Handing me a package of arugula, the handsome young man said it was nice to meet me and noticed my “I Voted” sticker.
Given all that’s happened since that day, I’m glad he didn’t ask who I voted for. I’m also glad I’ve found a new grocery store in which to buy nacho ingredients that I will eat tonight while, forgoing family and friends and the Super Bowl, I’ll be watching Napoleon Dynamite, because if we had just voted for Pedro for president, all our wildest dreams would be coming true.
And I could be watching the Super Bowl.
Contact Robin Swoboda at Robinswoboda@outlook.com.