Years ago there was a PBS documentary about how wonderful New York was at midcentury. Before the fiscal woes leading to the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline in The Daily News, before the upheaval of the 1960s, before the mayoralty of that looker John Lindsay.
In other words, back into that time rendered in black and white and presided over by someone no one remembers. Er, a Robert Wagner was once mayor?
Such nostalgia is of course easily teed up for hammering: Do you really want to proclaim your preference for the days before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act?
And yet I’ve always remembered that documentary’s footage of ecstatic fans at a Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers game, grinning crazily in the stands, scarfing hot dogs, laughing, generally carrying on, no doubt completely unencumbered by jobs that followed them wherever they went, and how I thought, “No one’s ever going to be that happy again.”
I stand before you corrected. Shocked, even, by the joy (that oddly revitalized buzzword) to be seen at Mets games. Or at least one particular Mets game, on Tuesday night of last week. (Tuesdays at Citi Field: when dogs, pretzels, even 12-ounce cups of Coors Light are just 5 bucks.)
And at least, that is, judging from the jumbotron when it busts out the fan cam, and the unsuspecting are caught dancing to the latest pop tunes, hugging, mugging, delivering a peck on the cheek maybe, and always the surprised gesticulation toward the big screen when they see themselves.
Silly? Perhaps. But you can’t take your eyes off it, and you can’t stop smiling.
And that’s not to mention the opposing team’s late-inning pitching change, when the ballpark went dark and started thrumming electronically while lights whipped around the upper-deck displays, seemingly chasing one after another. It was as if the stadium had been transformed into a U.F.O. about to lift off.
A purist could conceivably take issue with the snippets of music between, no, not batters, but even between pitches. I was once such a complainer. Now I simply sit back and enjoy it, thinking of that John Updike line about how “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”
The Mets have absolutely perfected the bread-and-circuses distraction of the masses. And now more than ever do we need it.