Chic or Not - Bowling

For the last four or five months my friends and I have been bowling about once a week. The truth is my friends bowl and I usually hang out. This is true because after about three frames I am wont to just sit and talk and watch the experts who are in the adjacent lanes; it seems we are always couched by young guys who roll in the high two hundreds. I am ADD effective, not enough to be medicated, but easily bored with things that I am not good at doing, and as I have a difficult time breaking 100, I pretty much blow at bowling—but I am great at hanging out and talking so that is naturally what I fall back on. I want to get better at bowling but apparently I will have to spend far more time there--and money--than I can afford.
I asked this kid named Andrew to teach me some pointers; he has the house high: 300-299-284 for a three game set. He is always in the lane right next to us, so he really gives us perspective in terms of how bad we really are. He said "it [was] all in the wrist." Like I know what that means, so he tried to show me. No improvement on my part so I reverted to just talking to him about how much he bowls. "Everyday for the last five years." It sounds like he would be a bowler nerdling, but he really is a cool kid. Bowling is probably his anti-drug; he probably bowls rather than smoking a bowl—so more power to him. Did I mention that he is really good, too?
My impression of bowling was largely influenced by cable-access game shows like "Bowling for Dollar$" where bowling leaguers would try to get a few hundred bucks in a local smoked filled alley--an Emcee/Bob Barker want-to-be host with a bad toupee cheering the would-be winners on.
But last month I was on a plane for what seemed like three weeks, and in the Delta in-flight magazine there was an article about how bowling is newly chic and the cool thing to do. For the hottest actors and actresses, as well as gangsta rappers – bowling is the new way to hang out and be cool. I always new I was cool, but this proved it. The article listed the venues where the stars bowl, how much they pay, and told of the private upstairs lanes reserved for them. It sounded so great. On my next trip to the lanes, I would have a new cool-chic-star attitude about bowling. I had these grandiose ideas about what this "new" bowling experience would look like.
I was greeted by a throng of women—not chasing me for my autograph—but singing "Redneck Woman" by Gretchen Wilson—whose music I am not familiar with, though I saw her on the Today Show and was embarrassed to hail from the south if this is the talent we turn out. I had to wade through these women to join my party, trying to avoid their Virginia Slim 120's, and just as I was in the midst of them they got to the part of the song where they scream, "HELL YEAH!!!" They were priceless. I bee-lined to Vonda, the bowling alley goddess, and asked her if we could use the private upstairs lanes reserved for stars—she asked me if I saw any stairs.
Needless to say, my dreams of cool-chic-star bowling were dashed. I was at Brunswick lanes in Taylors, SC, not BowlIN in Beverly Hills, CA. Trevis and Annissa were in the lanes next to us, not Nelly or Justin and Cameron.
This does not damper my desire to go bowling, I love the fellowship and occasional pin drop, when I am successful.

A good reality check for me, in terms of attitude as it relates to circumstance and geography. There is a sense in which I wish to rethink the sport of bowling, not because it is chic and cool or because my favorite rappers or movie stars do it, but because it is always quality time spent with people I love. The bowling alley - with Andrew the amazing, the redneck women with tall New Jersey bangs and their 120's, and Vonda who always smiles when she asks, "what size ya need?" and my group of friends who believe in the possibility of improvement - is a microcosm of this world so desperate for restoration in these tenebrific times. In some way, we as participants in a rapidly changing world effect some optimism on the bowling alley by being there doing what people do there; be sure, it is fun, but it is also a place to see how we are to be in the world, making it better as we acknowledge the poetry of life that breathes therein and seek to display by living, a simple message of hope.