The Happy Hunting Grounds

Dr. Z shares his Super Bowl moments:


My favorite Super Bowl line came in the 1985 contest between the 49ers and Dolphins, the only one held in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is the big Wednesday interview session in the Amfac Hotel in Burlingame, and the ballroom doors have just opened, spilling forth a huge mass of writers with their notebooks and little carry-bags and stuff. A gigantic, lowing, mooing herd.

Two young women in Amfac uniforms are standing across the hall, and I hear one of them saying, “This is incredible … incredible … simply incredible.”

“What’s incredible?” I ask her.

“I’ve never seen so many straight guys in my life,” she says.

If you’re a heterosexual man without any obvious physical deformities, San Francisco is like paradise. Extremely attractive women will all but take a number to go out with you, since even the straight guys are metrosexually dubious. And when faced with an alpha male, they practically go into heat.

When Chilliette’s bridesmaids came out to Minnesota for the wedding – she’s a Bay Area girl – they were more than a little taken aback by Big Chilly. The idea of a man who swatted his fiance on the butt and called her “woman” in public was just completely outside their experience. When one of them asked Chiliette if perhaps he wasn’t “a little, I don’t know, macho” Chiliette just laughed.

“He’s just from the Midwest”, she said, as if that explained everything*. And perhaps it does.

*it should be noted that downtown residents of cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago may be physically located in the Midwest, but they consider themselves to be metaphorical residents of New York City and comport themselves in such a manner. New Yorkers, meanwhile, scoff at their would-be imitators while simultaneously regarding themselves as metaphorical Europeans.