The final week of August was busy one, so this will be a Catch-All Grandstander, covering several topics.
The highlight of the weekend was the Saturday marriage of my great-niece Bridget Pike and Eric Cooper. It was lovely affair, and Bridget was a most beautiful bride, as were her sisters Monica and Frances as co-maids of honor. Mother of the Bride Karen Pike, my niece and godchild looked pretty stunning herself, I might add. As is my custom, it is not my place to post photos of the bride and groom in this forum. I will leave it up to Bridget and Eric if they choose to do so. If you see me in person. I'll be glad to show you, though.
One picture I will share is one of Linda and me all gussied up for the wedding. We clean up well if I say so myself.
The wedding took place at St. Paul's Cathedral, or as Catholic Pittsburghers simply put it, "the Cathedral", and it was beautiful. It had been many years since I was at a Mass at the Cathedral, and you just can't get used to the beauty of the place.
The reception followed at the Renaissance Hotel in dahntahn Pittsburgh, and while it was a wonderful party in a beautiful place, events taking place simultaneously in the Burgh made for some challenges. A noon football game between Pitt and Duquesne at Acrisure Stadium (50,000 plus attendance), the annual weekend long Ribfest, also at Acrisure, some sort of festival in town that shut down Liberty Avenue and Stanwix Streets by Gateway Center, and, most of all, a sold out PNC Park hosting the traveling Savannah Bananas baseball game (38,000+), all made for a gridlocked city as we made our way from the church to the reception. It's a long story, and I will spare you the details, except to say that the Renaissance, where Linda and I stayed that night, knocked seventy-five bucks off of our bill for the valet parking that they were unable to provide to us, even though we paid for it.
It was frustrating, but all frustrations disappeared as we finally got to the reception and had a great time celebrating Bridget and Eric. And just for shits and giggles, I took this photo from the second floor ballroom where the reception took place. It shows the mass of humanity leaving PNC Park and headed back into town to their cars that took up all of the parking spaces in the lower part of the City that night.
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This past Friday night I did something that I had not done since I was in high school: I went to a high school football game. Linda and I took ourselves out to Gesling Stadium on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Oakland (yep, two straight days in Oakland for us) to see the Central Catholic Vikings, my alma mater and a small (enrollment of about 800) private school, play the massive public school, the Pine-Richland Rams. The reason we went to the game was to see our niece Cameron perform as a Flag Girl as a part of the Pine-Richland Marching Band.
Somewhere among those thirty or so girls wielding
the yellow flags is Cameron. She was terrific!
The difference in the relative size of the two schools is evident when you see the bands. Pine-Richland's band is massive, probably as large as many collegiate marching bands, whereas Central's band consisted of 28 kids, some of whom were girls from the neighboring all girls school, Oakland Catholic. The band was never that small when I was a student there, but then again, enrollment then was about twice as much as it is now. God bless those kids in the band, but I wonder what they think when they have to share a field with competing bands from the big public schools.
As for the game, it started out in a fashion that I had never before seen. A Central player returned the opening kickoff 100 yards for a touchdown. On the subsequent kickoff, the Pine-Richland player returned it 96 yards for a TD. The game was twenty-seconds old and it was 7-7. Have you ever seen something like that?
Central ended up winning the game 34-20. The tiny private school will, as they usually are, be one of the best teams in Western PA this season. Central says that they do not "recruit" their football players. This alumnus is not so sure about that.
We ended up leaving at halftime after the bands performed so as to avoid what would have been an enormous traffic nightmare leaving the CMU parking garage.
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And on Thursday night, the night before the football game, we took in this movie on Netflix:
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This, of course, is based on the best selling novel by Richard Osman, which begat three - and counting - subsequent novels about four colorful crime solving retirees living in the upscale retirement community of Coopers Chase. This movie is perfectly cast with Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie as the amateur sleuths, and throw in Jonathan Pryce and Mirren's husband to add to the mix. Having read all of the books and gotten to know all of the characters, I really enjoyed this one. Trust me though, even if you haven't read the books, but enjoy this type of entertainment, I think that you will like this movie.
Oh, and there is a great little "easter egg" in this one where Pryce comments on Mirren "looking like the Queen". It's perfect.
The movie won't win any awards or appear on any top Ten Lists, but it's worth seeing. The Grandstander gives it Three Stars.
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So, I've gone on this long, and I haven't even mentioned the delightful trip that we took to Centre County two weeks ago to visit Marilyn's brother George and his wife Ann. That one deserves its own write up so watch for it later this week.
