A Glimpse Into A Marriage — OR — To Watch The Super Bowl or Not?

Back in my early twenties when I was married to my first husband, football (really ALL sports) but especially football was a sacred part of our weekends.

And I suppose as is true with most football fans, no game all year held the same slavish devotion that the SUPER BOWL did for him. It didn’t matter if it was our home team (my husband at the time could make any team his home team)—if they’d made it to the bowl—we were hosting the party!

And that’s what we did. For seven years straight we hosted or co-hosted with friends, the raucous, cut throat, seldom sober, and always gluttonous, SUPER BOWL SUNDAY festivities.

Fuck you Bristol Farms and your fancy artisanal cheese plate!

This was back in the late seventies when I learned the white-trash way of making queso dip by adding Pace Picante sauce to Velveeta which is not actually cheese but a highly processed cheese-like product that will still be here after all the cockroaches die in the nuclear holocaust. Nevertheless, I used to drink the stuff. I’m sure that sometime in the not-so-distant future, science will discover that Velveeta causes sarcasm, or the unbridled use of profanity and THAT will explain EVERTHING…

Suffice it to say, that when I met my current husband and he was not the least bit interested in any sport that didn’t involve an internal combustion engine, that was okay by me! 

So, now here we are, almost forty years after those fake cheese & beer feasts which were centered around a ball being run down a field by gown men who, as it turns out were turning each other’s brains to mush—and I couldn’t care less about football. Seriously. To care any less I’d have to get rid of my TV all together or move to the UK where REAL football originated. 

All of this to say, did you watch the game yesterday? Yeah, we didn’t either.

Ladies and gentlemen, since neither of us follow football, here’s a glimpse into how the sausage is made at our house—I give you—THE BERTOLUS’ SUPER BOWL DECISION MAKING PROCESS:

Him: What Time is the Super Bowl?

Me: I have no idea.

Him: Who’s playing?

Me: I think it’s the Rams and The Patriots.

Him: Are we for either of those teams?

Me: Well, the Rams are from LA so I guess we’re for them. Besides, nobody likes the Patriots.

Him: Why? 

Me: I have no idea. I think it’s because they win every year… and Tom Brady.

Him: Who’s Tom Brady and why don’t we like him?

Me: He’s the guy who throws the ball, he’s married to a super model, and he wrote a diet book which makes him intolerable. 

Him: What city are the Patriots from?

Me: New England.

Him: That’s not a city, it’s an entire region…

Me: Listen, I don’t make the rules.

Him: But don’t we usually watch it?

Me: We do if we go to a party, but only to be polite and only if there’s a pool with a decent amount of money at stake. And even then we mostly drink beer and eat synthetic cheese.

Him: So if we watch it here…

Me: It’s our house so we only watch the commercials!

Him: Oh yeah. We tune in late, reverse DVR it, speed past the game and stop at the commercials. 

Me: Yep. And we watch half-time if it’s somebody good like Gaga or Bruno Mars or Beyoncé or anybody but Maroon 5.

Him: Right.

A few minutes go by…

Me: So, whaddya wanna do?

Him: I dunno. Wanna play cards?

Me: Sure. Hey, do we have any pub cheese? (Old habits die hard.)

THE END