Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom

Oklahoma City: conquered. No snow after all.

What you should know about OKC: All lettuce comes from a bag. Some public restrooms double as tornado shelters (indicated by a placard outside the entrance illustrated with a black tornado, which looks suspiciously like a turd). Do not order the Ahi tuna (even if you well know that tuna in OKC cannot possibly be good, but still, it is game day and you are a pescetarian and believe that protein is required to be properly fueled). Also, that children ride the elevators for fun (maybe children do this everywhere, but there were SO MANY elevator-riding orphans in OKC, and they will insist on pressing the buttons for you, and all you can think is, "Kid, where I come from, you could get paid to do that). Service industry professionals are ridiculously kind and attentive, and in general, Okies are super nice and all the unsolicited hellos and waves from strangers on the street will be a little unnerving.

Oh, and if you order a yogurt and granola parfait in Caffeina's Markeplace, the hotel's cafe, the granola will be a pulverized Nature's Valley granola bar. When you point this out to the barista, she will not understand why this is disgusting or weird.

Finally, that banked track roller derby could be frighteningly big in Oklahoma. It's a city where there isn't a whole lot to do on a Saturday night, and its denizens are really, really enthusiastic about sports.

The Red Dirt Rebellion Roller Girls rented the large and well-lit Cox Center arena for the game, which was conveniently conjoined to our hotel via Sky Bridge, providing the Aftershockers (my team) a theoretical opportunity to never set foot on a public walkway in OKC. It was hard to gauge crowd size inside the Cox, but I would hazard a couple of thousand, which is impressive considering that this league isn't well-established. The Doll Factory's capacity is 1700, and though we almost always sell out, we push those 1700 seats hard. OKC is, obviously, a much smaller town.

The game was a blowout in favor of the Aftershockers. The final score was 239-31. RDRRG put up a good fight, and hell if those ladies aren't tenacious, but they're still awful green. With time and experience, I'm certain they will become a force, and it's exciting to have another banked track league up-and-coming in such an exotic locale.

3 comments:

Pat F. said...

*plenty of air and plenty of room*

But yeah, when I saw the score, I cringed, a lot... Even in good fun, it's gotta be tough to be rolled like that. Yikes.

Now, let's see if you gals can do the same to San Diego. Best of luck!

Alisonian said...

Ok I only have to say this because I live in Atlanta and the last restaurant I worked at had the same thing, I assume. Nature Valley actually sells granola (maybe to restaurants only, I've never seen it in a store), in a big, like 2 lb., cereal bag. It just happens to eerily resemble a smashed up Oat N Honey granola bar. People would get mad at us for that, like we were back there stomping on granola bar wrappers or something. Also the restaurant owners didn't care about our opinion of the granola we served. I don't even know why I am bothering to point this out? I miss working there I guess. Oklahoma sounds kind of charming, though!

Judy Gloom said...

i dunno...i asked the barista if it was a "crushed up nature's valley granola bar" and she said it was! in any case, nature's valley does not = real granola. I'm certainly spoiled by the food in LA though OKC was not without its charm.