wdevoe, Thu, August 6th, 2009

No one applauds anymore.
I was at the circus with my family a couple of months ago, and virtually no one clapped for anything.
A woman fired herself out of a cannon. Nothing.
A man walked upside-down along the rafters of the stadium we were in by hooking his feet into tiny ropes. Not one round of applause.
A performer balanced a running chainsaw on his chin while juggling household appliances. I looked over and saw a man playing Tetris on his cell phone.
I made it a point of compensating for the lack of claptitude by applauding as loudly and for as long as I could. This embarrassed and annoyed my six-year-old, Kevin.
“Why are you clapping so loud?” he whined at me.
“Because a man just rode a motorcycle straight up a flagpole while a half-naked woman dangled from his exhaust pipes, that’s why,” I say bitterly. “I can’t do that, can you?”
“You just took the training wheels off my bike yesterday.”
“Exactly.”
What’s odd is that the child who didn’t give a rat’s behind when a man was putting his head into the mouths of white tigers, is the same one who accused me of being the worst father in the world when I didn’t buy him a $28 Snowcone in a plastic white tiger mug.
People are weird when it comes to what they’re going to get excited about. In the case of the circus, I suppose you could make the case that media and technology have desensitized us to the point where if a man sets himself on fire and walks a tightrope, it’s really nothing to bat an eye at.
(“Yeah, that’s cool I guess, but I did that a few times yesterday on my Wii Fit balance board,” says little Johnny.)
There are some people, however who will applaud for anything. The Oscars are a good place to see examples of this. Some past-his-prime actor will walk out on stage to introduce candidates for “Best Pretending in a Film with a Talking Badger” and he’ll get a 10-minute standing ovation just for introducing himself.
I don’t get an ovation when I introduce myself. I’ve tried waiting 10 minutes just to see if anyone would applaud my very presence, but nothing so far. I had to speak at an event that was filled with friends and family once, and thought it might be a good idea to bring along one of those lighted “Applause” signs to help with my reception. The funeral director asked that I take it off the casket.
I don’t get people who clap at basketball games.
I have to admit, I’m not the biggest sports fanatic. I like watching hockey, lacrosse and, when I find myself awake at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, Australian-rules football. These sports seem to cater to my ferret-like attention span and my propensity to be attracted to things with waning or non-existent popularity (newspaper, anyone?). In the case of Australian-rules football, the fact that I have no idea of just what in the hell is going on makes it easier for me to enjoy. One Tuesday morning, watching all of those ex-convicts kick, bounce and run around with that melon-looking thing got me cheering so loudly I woke up the wife and kids.
Kevin is the first down the stairs. “Is this Quidditch? Is that Harry Potter?”
“What are you doing?” asks the angry young woman who is my wife.
“Watching Australian-rules football,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the field is shaped like an oval.”
She gets drawn in by the melange of upright posts, weirdly drawn chalk lines and handsome men pummeling each other for no apparent reason.
“Who’s winning?” she asks.
“I have no idea,” I say, “but they just had to stop play because a guy got a thumb in his eye.”
“A whole thumb? Was it still attached to someone’s hand?”
Back to basketball. I don’t get why people get so excited over it.
A team goes up the court, puts the ball in the hoop, and half the people in the stadium go nuts. The other team is handed the ball directly thereafter and do the same exact thing. Once again, half the people go nuts.
This happens approximately 716 times over the course of a regulation game, and every time it happens, half the people in attendance freak out as if they’ve never seen it before.
Here’s an idea: Save your energy. Just wait until the end of the game and clap once.
I find it encouraging that people still applaud at parades. While parades are sort of the anti-circus (for the most part, the main attraction is people walking), I find it refreshing to see members of a community come out in force and applaud other members of the community.
The company I work for takes part in a few of these parades, and if you’ve never experienced watching The Spotlight Newspapers van lumber along in a Fourth of July, Flag Day or Groundhog Day parade… well, it’s your loss, really.
I don’t mean to denigrate our news organization or disparage the communities in which we have had the honor of participating in a parade, but The Spotlight van is — well, let’s just say that the van is a little less than flattering on the eyes.
If The Spotlight van were the ugly daughter of a prominent politician or celebrity, we in the news business would describe it as “unfortunate looking.”
That may be understating things. How about this:
If The Spotlight van were a Transformer, its name would be Rustimus Grime. It would transform into a 48-year-old fry cook who is two years behind on his child support.
My son and I had the honor of driving the van in the short procession that preceded Town of Bethlehem tree lighting ceremony last winter. We decked the van out with ornaments, a wreath and Christmas lights that we rigged to this portable, rechargeable jump-starting/flashlight/inverter device.
I charged that thing all day, knowing that Kevin was looking forward to throwing the switch as we stepped off, lighting the van up like a rolling Christmas tree and making the magic happen in front of the good people that came out to see us, despite the cold weather.
When the time came, we took our place between a float with Santa Clause on it and a shiny, well-lit fire engine. We stepped off from the parking lot at Town Hall and when the front tires hit the street, I gave the signal to my son to flip the switch. The lights beamed almost as brightly as his smile did.
They stayed on for about a second-and-a-half and then they were out before the rear tires hit the pavement.
“What’s happening?” Kevin screamed like the Poseidon just tipped over.
“I don’t know,” I said and tried to look at our little generator without rear-ending Santa. “Try flicking the switch on and off.”
That seemed to work for a while, but every time he cut the switch on, the lights got progressively dimmer.
People were still applauding us, although I bet it helped being sandwiched between Old St. Nick and a beautiful fire truck.
By the time we rolled into the end of the route, the lights were dead, the ornaments were broken and I’m pretty sure the wreath had gotten under the van somehow and its plastic pine needles were melting onto the muffler.
“Let’s hurry up and get this thing back to the office before it explodes,” I said to Kevin.
“Wait a minute, dad,” he said. “They’re still clapping.”
He stood up in the cab of the old white van and took a bow.

Pop Culture is America’s No. 1 resource for sports trivia and household pest control. It is published monthly in The Spotlight and can be found at www.spotlightnewss.com/blogs.

CATEGORY: General Society

TAGS: Clap, spotlight, applause, parade,

Permalink

72.0 °F
(22.2 °C)