Super Bowl Sunday in the yellow and red house

Like so many of my paisanos, I'm also guilty of transforming the practices and rituals of holidays so that they sort of lose their original significance. Superbowl Sunday is one of the American "holidays" whose presence I do try to acknowledge in some small way of my own.

So for Super Bowl XLII...

This morning I invited my friend, "Hey, it's Super Bowl Sunday! Wanna come over and eat? I'm thinking enchiladas and beer - muy Super Bowl food." Her response, "Do you even know who's playing this year?" implied that I haven't always. "Yes," I replied with confidence. "The Patriots and New York." "Which New York?" she challenged. I paused, letting her think I didn't know before saying, "Giants!" She pushed me to my limits, "Do you know where they're playing?" Shit. "Las Vegas?" "Arizona." "I was going to say that! So do you have any beer? We have to have beer for the Super Bowl!" "Are we even going to watch any of the game?" It was a fair question. "Well, the TV is definitely going to be on, so it's an option. But I understand if you want to be somewhere more conducive to football watching than 231." She said she'd come over so...

...an hour or so later, back at 231 I enthusiastically proclaimed to my husband that we were "having a Super Bowl party!" "Are we expected to watch the game?" he asked. Another fair question. I replied, again, "Well, the TV is definitely going to be on, so it's an option," and added "but not a requirement." "Good," he said, and for some reason known only to him, leveled a red mini-flashlight at me before continuing, "because I...don't...give...a...flying...fuck." He paused and then declared, "But after I get back from breaking in the headers on the truck I'll make that dessert thing I saw on TV! Do we have any rum?"

I can be criticized, perhaps, for watching only a very small part of the champions' culminating game without having seen any of the games that got them this far. But I can't be called a fair weather fan because I don't really care who wins. Nor should anyone sit in judgment of my wanting to partake just a bit in this tradition (in my own small way). I am an American after all, and I like being one, and there's nothing wrong with acting like one, especially on Super Bowl Sunday. I wouldn't look down on someone from Brasil for watching the World Cup, would I?

So, yes, I'll watch a bit of the game, because I want to, but also because I don't think simply reading Cheryl Cole's article, "Resisting the Canon: Feminist Cultural Studies, Sport, and Technologies of the Body" (Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 1993) is exactly in the spirit of the day.