But easily a double, possibly stretching to a triple.

Rudi and I just returned home from a sneak preview of Fever Pitch, the new Drew Barrymore-Jimmy Fallon baseball flick. I didn’t go in expecting The Natural, but I was hoping for something better than Major League II.

Drew plays a workaholic’ish (if she were a real workaholic, she wouldn’t come to the game at all, but then we wouldn’t have a movie plot) businesswoman. Jimmy plays a high school math teacher and a die-hard Sox fan. You know… crazy. You can see where this is all going, and it doesn’t stray from the predictable storyline. There are no knuckleballs or curveballs (a couple of screwball moments, but you expect those with these stars); pretty much you’re just going to get the straight fastball the whole way. And I think the audience is going to be okay with that in general.

For people who don’t enjoy the prosaic romantic comedy (Sam?), you aren’t going to find this anything unexpected and I wouldn’t recommend shelling out more than a matinee/discount ticket price for it.

But for folks who sometimes wonder if their current obsession may be driving their daily life, I’d say you’ll find something in here.

Fever Pitch aims to be a sweet, romantic comedy and is just that.

—-

Best baseball movies of my lifetime:

The Natural
Field of Dreams
Bull Durham
A League of Their Own

(I haven’t seen any of the earlier baseball films, but they’re on my list. Any recommendations for which ones to see first?)

I would just like to preface this by saying that I know it’s wrong to complain about having too much bounty. I’m sure summer squash growers agree with me on this.

But I am disappointed that I already have concert tix for Falcon Ridge for the same time James Taylor is playing in concert down here.

JT was the first concert I went to as an adult. And I’ve gone hundreds of miles out of my way (Virginia Beach is not really on the way from Salt Lake to Middletown) just to catch his show.

But Falcon Ridge has become an annual event and one I’d be sad to miss. We used to camp with the Dar-listers (who are a nice, welcoming bunch), since that’s how I learned about the event, but for the past several years, we’ve been sharing a campsite (okay, an imaginarily demarcated space in a hayfield) with my former co-worker Shelley, her husband, Mike, and their two kids. And while I might be convinced to skip the festival in order to catch another concert, I’d be hard pressed to deliberately miss out on the cameraderie.

So no JT concert this year…

And I’ll be okay with that.

I love the fact that the weather has been so warm as to allow summer shoes, but I could definitely live without the war wounds associated with them. My right foot is killing me and the only shoes that I can wear comfortably today are the flip-flop style. Owww!