Opening Day in Larryville / Chip's Biography, Vol. II

For many local scenesters, opening day of kickball season remains the single greatest day of the year. Personally, we're ready for a seismic scene-shift in which locals embrace another ridiculous childhood game (Red Rover, maybe, or Pop The Whip?). But kickball seems here to stay and it's hard not to catch a bit of the fever when so many rumors are circulating about the first Game of the Week tonight between Star Bar Barracudas and The Goats.

Will The Goats really take the field riding a herd of tiny goats?

Do the Star Bar players really have a vicious barracuda mascot that is likely to bite the herd of goats?

Will the Harper Valley PTA pirate ship really put into port at Hobbs bearing the entire team dressed in full pirate regalia?

Will Chip really be streaking (not because he cares anything about kickball, but simply because it's fucking hot outside)?

We're anxious to find out, and we're also looking for a full-time kickball reporter for the LC (since we almost always opt to go to the Sunday Replay matinees instead of attending any of the games). Reply if interested in this important position.

In the meantime, head over here and enjoy Coach Billy Gay Cyrus's commentary on the opening week match-ups. Here's our favorite statement:

"Whoever chose to put [Pita Pit] against the new-to-the-league Cork & Barrel Corksuckers in Week 1 is an asshole."

Let's kick off today's festivities with one of our favorite L.com kickball party pics.



















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Origin stories are so hip right now (X-Men: First Class is raking in the bucks at the multiplex this weekend), so we're hopping on the bandwagon and reprinting Chip's biography on Sundays this summer (it first appeared on a now-defunct blog). Today we catch up with Chip as he begins college at Pittsburg State.

"Chip's college years began in Pitt State, where he developed a love for basketball as he watched his school's Fighting Gorillas. To this day he still delights in singing a fight song of "one banana/two banana," but in the land of the Jayhawks, he is often called a "bitch" when he does so. Off the court, however, there was no talk of monkeys in the classroom, this being southeast Kansas. And Chip felt he couldn't properly evolve in this climate, where he spent his college weekends at Rusty's, watching old men drink Natty Lite and debate the merits of Fords and Chevies. There was poetry in this everyday life on the farm, but young Chip could not see it. He desired the poetry of a university town, of a classroom environment where he could read other things besides Longfellow. Chip needed Keats, Byron, and Shelley, something that spoke to his solitude and dark Romantic sensibility. He kept hearing rumors of a glorious (some said "wicked") place to the North, where dancing was legal, pre-marital sex was the norm, and poets roamed the streets in a drunken haze. So one fateful night over dinner, our hero informed his parents that he could no longer remain in southeast Kansas but instead needed to see the world (of northeast Kansas). His parents were sad for him to leave, but ultimately agreed that it might be best, for their son was "different" from most townsfolk, a brooding intellectual whose inmost desires could only be satisfied by the nubile company of sorority women who spent their weekends fucked-up at Quinton's and not by the girl-next-door types of Fort Scott. So he said goodbye to his high-school sweetheart CindyLee--after numerous years of "heavy petting," which is as far as relationships ever progressed in Fort Scott--and boarded a train for Larryville. We'll catch up with him there in the next installment of Chip: Man or Myth."