Dodger Stadium - Baseball Park or Comedy Central

I have only been to Dodger Stadium twice and both times were an adventure. The first time, I was with my friends, Wendy and Tim. We fought rush hour traffic in L.A. (similar to dodging and weaving through a military zone) to get there on time after work. As we approached the Stadium, the neighborhood started to get bad. I mean, really bad, like were we lost and in Compton by mistake bad. Once we safely navigated the crack houses and the broken down cars on the surrounding streets we payed our $20 for parking (nothing is cheap in L.A. either). We entered the stadium gates and were immediately given free posters of the team, which we spent the rest of the night hitting each other on the head with and yelling through, like every other 30 year acting like they were 8 was doing.

Then came our first problem. We were not sitting together! How could this be? We bought 3 tickets on Ticketmaster in the same transaction yet Tim was seated 2 sections away from us. Did the person stuffing tickets into an envelope sneeze while he or she was packing our tickets and just pick up 3 tickets from the floor and put them into the envelope without caring if the seats were together? After finagling a seat for Tim near us, we realized out of the 40 - 50 sections in the entire stadium only ours and one other section was full. Here we are squashed in like sardines fighting for some room and the rest of the stadium could occupy 3 chairs each. Argh!

Then it was off to the beer line where another drama ensued. Apparently the Dodgers think we are all drunken lushes and limit beer sales to 2 at time. Since we had sent Tim for 3 beers (1 for EACH of us), he had to stand in line twice. Expletives were dropped, an argument ensued with the cashier and a rant that included "you can buy crack a block from here but I can not buy more than 2 beers" was muttered.

The rest of the evening passed with no incident.

The second time to Dodger Stadium Wendy and I prepared ourselves. I put on my Yankee shirt (it really doesn't matter that the Yankees weren't playing) and off we went. Without Tim though, we were late and we were potentially going to have to park on in the back 40 and trek a good mile uphill both ways to reach the stadium. Given that I had just had a softball accident and my leg was bruised from ankle to thigh, we thought we would approach a cute parking attendant and see if we could get closer. As we approached Wendy told me to look pathetic. The parking attendant stopped us, let's call him Rico, and asked up what we wanted. We batted our eye lashes and said I was injured and could we please, please, please park closer.

He gave us access to the media area to park, but as we were negotiating our primo parking lot, Wendy and I started smelling a horrible stench. I mean this smell was like a dead corpse rotting smell (not that I really know what that smells like, but this is what I think it must smell like). We asked Rico what was that horrible smell and he said it always smells like this! And somehow this was normal and we proceeded into the stadium with our shirts pulled up over our faces like Michael Jackson in his mask days.

This game they gave us blue furry hats to wear so the Stadium looked like a Smurf convention had invaded. That wasn't bad, but after the game, in our fight and flight response to get out of the ghetto and back to suburbs we forgot to take off our hats. We obliviously wore these hats down the 405 as we cruised at 70 mph to get back to the hotel. We went into the hotel with these hats on, stopped at the bar to check the final score (as we had left the game early), went to the front desk to request a wake up call all while looking like aliens from Smurfville. Finally one of the staff members asked us if we had been at the game and we asked him why with a straight face. At this point, he nearly fell over laughing, couldn't talk between the chuckles and just pointed at our heads!

The moral of the story is always remember to take your blue furry hats off before leaving the stadium, and if you ever go to Dodger Stadium make sure you are prepared for some laughs!