S is for Super Bowl, Singing, and Stuck

February kicked off the same way it does every year...with the Super Bowl. This year, Ryan and Sarah, a young married couple from our church, invited a bunch of us over to watch the big game. There were all the makings of a good Super Bowl party: a big screen TV, plenty of junk food, and a nice ratio of people who were way too into the game to people who were confused as to what was even happening. Cary Anne and I are not really into professional sports. (A big surprise coming from people with Theatre degrees, huh?) So when it comes to situations like the Super Bowl, we tend to just root for whichever team is from a place close to one of our hometowns. Cary Anne grew up in Virginia about an hour away from Baltimore. So for one night, we were Ravens fans. Overall, we had a fun time watching the game, even the half hour when there was no game to watch thanks to a power outage at the stadium. And in the end, our root-for-the-not-really-your-hometown-team-but-close-enough plan meant we got to celebrate a victory.

In February we also had a great time celebrating our friend Ben's birthday. Ben's birthday is actually at the end of January, and at that time we had a small MAN group celebration. (MAN group is what Ben, Josh, and I call our discipleship meetings. Every Wednesday night we get together just to talk and hang out and "do life together," to steal a hip churchy phrase.) So one Wednesday night we had pizza and wings and birthday cake. Since Cary Anne was home that night, we allowed her to partake, and we were a (wo)MAN group for just one night.

Later Ben wanted to have a real party, so he invited a bunch of people out to karaoke one Sunday night. In Lexington, Cary Anne and I would sometimes go to karaoke at a shabby bar with some of my co-workers from Krispy Kreme. We didn't go that often, because a lot of times it was just a continual stream of barely sober people singing sad country songs. They would give us weird looks as we would scream-sing 80's power ballads. Ben's birthday was not that kind of karaoke. He had rented all of us a private room, which is not even something I knew existed in the karaoke world. When we pulled up, the place looked suspiciously like a place where you would go to get an exotic message, complete with the poster of a woman holding a microphone provocatively close to her open mouth. We walked into the small lobby where there was no front desk or sign, just a door to the left and a door to the right. We decided to take the door on the right. It led down a long hallway with rooms on either side, which didn't do much to ease the sex parlor vibe. Eventually, we came upon a bar, which also served as the "front" desk. We told the bar tender we were with Ben, and he pointed to the door at the end of the hall. I pulled my sleeve down over my hand and used it to open the door.

Inside was basically a mini night club, complete with flashing lights, several big screen TVs, and couches on every wall. As we all crowded in, the mood changed from weary to jovial. There was not a lot of sitting around and listening to people sing. Pretty much every song was a group sing-along, and by the end of the night, the room had just turned into one giant dance party.

A couple of days after Ben's birthday, Cary Anne got stranded at the movie theater late one night. The church small group she and I are currently in is dedicated to recognizing creativity as a spiritual gift and sharpening your artistic discipline. Part of the curriculum encourages you to take yourself on an "artist's date" every week, which means taking time to treat yourself to an activity by yourself every week that your inner artist will enjoy. (Like all artistic curriculum, it's a half practical / half hippy non-sense.) So Cary Anne went to the movies by herself, but when she came out she realized her driver's side wheels were on a sheet of ice and her passenger side wheels were in a deep puddle, and she couldn't get enough traction to move. Kelly and I drove to her to try to rescue her. We threw salt down on the ice and tried to wedge a board into the puddle in an attempt to gain some traction, but after 15 minutes we still hadn't made much progress. Eventually Kelly said, "Why don't we just throw this mother in neutral and push?" After we started pushing, Kelly managed to step right into the ankle-deep frigid puddle. Our shabby condition attracted the attention of a couple of passer-bys, who decided to lend a hand. "Whoa, it's icy over here," one of them said. Yep. Hence the stuck car. Luckily, after a few minutes of pushing, we managed to get the car out onto the road.

This is the type of winter nonsense people warned us about before we moved to Chicago.