There’s been a Wisconsin wisp of chill in the late summer air, and with autumn in the offing, football season is once again upon us. America’s favorite pastime is not Wisconsin’s. Yes, the Brewers have a discrete charm, when and if they win, and now they even have a gay player on their minor league team. Yay! Those lanky Bucks are fun, too, especially if you’re a billionaire. But here there’s nothing like football.
When I first settled in Milwaukee, a gay farmer friend was over one Sunday morning. He asked if we could watch the game. I responded, “Sure,” with feigned but enthusiastic conviction as if it were a rhetorical question. Actually, I was thinking, “What game?” But that morning, I got religion.
There’s a certain irony here. Of all professional sports, football has a particularly homophobic reputation (just ask Michael Sam). Yet, for the gay Green Bay Packers fan, green and gold loyalty trumps even LGBT allegiance. It could be that subliminally messaging team name. Or, perhaps it’s just because football is really an al fresco version of that other gay passion, ballet.
Speaking of double entendre, ballet terms are in French. In football one often uses French but must ask forgiveness for it. In ballet, performers form the corps, while in football they’re called the line. There are stars in each—the quarterback in football and, in ballet, the prima ballerina (female) or danseur noble (male). Stars of either discipline may attain the title prima donna. Both arts rely on lots of choreographed running and jumping with graceful grands jetés (as in our famous grand jeté Lambeau), pirouettes and those audience-pleasing, backward movements, en arrière.
Otherwise, although football players may be 200 pounds heavier, there’s not much else that differentiates them from ballet dancers. The physical athleticism of both is essentially the same. There are more collisions in football, but they’re intentional. In ballet, however, in the event of a pas de deux faux-pas, unlike football, no one throws a yellow hanky in dismay. That would be gauche.
Instead, one inhales a critical, guised as sympathetic gasp, accompanied by an obligatory serrant perles (clutching one’s pearls). As for the costumes, both sport dramatic color combinations and revealing tights. And, while only some ballet dancers wear tiaras, all football players do, except, because they perform in those big cloche hats, the tiara is worn en avant, to the front, like a grill on a vintage Bugatti. Traditionally, after a winning performance, dancers receive a bouquet of roses. In football, winners get a whole bowl of them, not to mention a rose parade.
Anyway, someone recently asked me if I were a Packer fan (the football kind, not the gay one). “Well, I live here,” I replied. If you’re from here it’s what you do, like shoveling snow. And, when I get one of those dopey “So, yer a cheese head” remarks from some Bears fan (the football kind, not the gay one), I answer, “Yes,” but with the qualifier, “an artisan cheese head.”
