Michigan Pro Hockey Tour - March 1998

Happy March everybody!

The highlight of my February was a fun-packed, three day weekend trip to Orlando, Florida with Colleen and Kristin. We had SUCH a blast together that we decided we had to make it an annual event. Friendships like that are just too few and far between to let fall by the wayside simply because there are miles separating us. Only next time, I think we'll probably go to a town that has absolutely nothing to do but stay at a resort. That way we never have to leave the resort, beach, pool, whatever, and we can just relax. It will probably be somewhere further south and later in the year so we can have 90 degree weather because we discovered that Orlando in early February was NOT warm. Yes, it was very disappointing. I really wanted to hit a water park or lay by the pool. Oh well. Now I know, right?

We did get up Saturday morning and saw some deceiving sunshine out the window. We thought it was going to be a warm day so we left our jackets in the hotel room. By the time we got to the monorail to take us to Epcot we were feeling quite foolish because we were quite frozen. Our teeth were chattering but we tried to be tough Alaskan women. I don’t think we succeeded because the first thing we had to do when we got to Epcot was head straight for the gift shops to look for sweatshirts! We all ended up buying the same one (doin the “girlfriend” thing) and many of our pictures turned out great because they’re of a brunette, a redhead and a blonde, and we all have on the same navy blue “Walt Disney World” sweatshirt. We got a really great one of the three of us with the Epcot “golf ball” (Spaceship Earth) in the background. It’s my favorite – what a great shot.

Kristin drove down from Georgia in her convertible Mustang and picked me up at the airport late Thursday night. We stayed at a military hotel called Shades of Green (very nice, very cheap) and we stayed up all night talking and catching up. Then on Friday, we got up and went to the Disney World Marketplace. We had lunch at Planet Hollywood then wandered around the marketplace, just window shopping. We happened upon a crowd of people hanging around outside of what looked like a boarded up shop. Turns out, it was a magic store that was getting ready to open and it was owned by David Copperfield. We asked somebody what everyone was waiting for and he said he’d heard that David Copperfield was going to be making an appearance. No sooner did he say that, when the door opened and out he came! Kris and I got both our pictures with him. Sigh. He is so good looking. I wanted to ask him how he did the trick of making me feel tingly all over. Ha ha. Kris thinks he was looking at me. He does like blondes, you know. Just kidding. There were a bunch of young cheerleaders, apparently in town for a competition, going ga-ga over him, and he made them all do a cheer for him before he would sign autographs. Too funny. We were telling Colleen about it later at the airport and she mused that it really would be fun to be able to make people do silly stuff like that for no reason, just to have a picture with you. Ha. He’s coming to Grand Rapids to do his “Dreams and Nightmares” show on March 25th. I was thinking about getting some of the girls together to go, because the guys are on the road that day, but tickets are over $50 each. Ouch. We’ll see.

Then Kris and I went to the airport and picked up Colleen. She was just bursting to tell us that she had just had the most interesting conversation with man on the plane all the way from D.C. He told her he has put in over 7000 hours of study of demons, alien encounters and how it all relates to the Bible. Apparently, she was convinced that he had proven many of the facts he presented her with. She was so excited to tell us all about it when she got off the plane and we ended up talking about it late into the night. We stayed up until 3am both nights talking a hundred miles an hour like teenagers. I told her my theories based on what I knew and we batted everything around in our minds for hours. She ended up getting so freaked out that she was scared to get up and go to the bathroom in the dark. Ha. Colleen is also on a personal mission to convert the whole east coast to friendly-ism. She's converted the whole building she works in and has now aspired to higher mountains. She started with the guy at the ticket counter when she checked in for her flight. He was so charmed by her graces that he upgraded her to first class just for being nice! That was how she got the opportunity to sit next to this interesting man. Neat, eh? It just goes to prove that a smile or two can go a long way if it’s genuine. Didn’t mom tell us all that?

Anyway, the three of us went to Pleasure Island on Friday night. It’s a little pedestrian mall right by the marketplace that’s all shops and clubs, each with a different theme. There was a bar that we sat at for a while called “Surf’s Up” and it had a beach theme. There was a mediocre band there, but not much to report, we didn’t stay there long. Then there was a 70's bar called 8 Traxx that we went to where we danced for hours – they were playing all the music that we liked and the place was packed. We also went to a comedy club that was ALL improvisation. It was SO impressive! There was a cast of 6 characters and all the comedy they did was based on material that they got from the audience. They had songs and rhymes and entire monologues that were customized for the people in OUR audience. It was one of the neatest things I’ve ever seen. What I would give to have the talent to think on my feet that well! It was really incredible. There was also a big stage out in the street, and the Spinners were performing there. We watched them while we were standing in line for the comedy club but not much longer than that because it was drizzling rain and pretty cold. We also went to a place later called The Adventurers Club, which had an off-the-wall British theme to it and there was a short comedy skit going on in there, too. They made everyone do a salute where you have to say, “Kongaloosh!”, we drank a fruity drink called a Kongaloosh, and learned a beer drinking song to the tune of Do, Re, Mi from the Sound of Music. The three of us called Bill’s voice mail and sang it for him, laughing our heads off the whole time, I can’t imagine that he heard a single word of it. I’ll share it with you, but it was really one of those times where you had to be there to truly appreciate the humor. You understand, of course. Here you go:

(to the tune of Do, Re, Mi from the Sound of Music)
Do - the stuff I buy beer with
Re - the guy I buy beer from
Mi - the guy I buy beer for
Fa - the distance to the store
So - I think I'll have a beer
La – (pause) La la la la la la
Ti - No thanks, I'll have a beer
and that will bring us back to do, do, do, do...

I’m giggling just typing this again. It was soooo funny at the time!! (Kongaloosh, girls!! Wahoo!)

The next day (Saturday) we got up, went to breakfast (Mother Colleen insisted that we start our day off with a nutritious meal), then headed to Epcot. After we bought our sweatshirts and the hottest mocha we could find, we went to a 3D presentation called, “Honey, I shrunk the audience.” It was based on the movies and actually went a step beyond regular 3D shows. For example, Rick Moranis’ young son was playing with one of the inventions and dropped his pet mouse into a machine called a “multiplier.” It cloned the mouse and you saw thousands of little mice running and squeaking all over the screen. Well… all of a sudden, I could feel about a hundred mice ACTUALLY RUNNING UP MY LEGS!!! All three of us screamed at the top of our lungs and stuck our legs right up in the air as high as we could! Good thing it was dark in the theatre because that would’ve been hilarious to see! It was the creepiest feeling!! My skin was crawling and I could feel the hair on the back of my neck bristling! It’s giving me shivers again just thinking about it. We couldn’t figure out how they did that, we were looking for wires sticking out of our seats or something when the show was over, but we found nothing. I’m telling you, I could actually feel hundreds of little, tiny claws grabbing at my legs trying to climb up. (yeeeeek!) It was awful.

Then at the end of the show, when we were “enlarged” back to normal size again, the already normal sized dog somehow got in the way of the ray and became huge. He stuck his head out from behind the curtain to take one last look at the audience, then sneezed. We had water sprayed all over us and man, talk about a gross feeling!! Blech! The whole show was great. At one point, when the audience was still “small,” the older son’s snake (which was huge compared to us) was slithering around and stuck his head right in our faces, then opened his mouth wide and hissed. Trying keeping your eyes open looking at THAT in 3D! Yikes.

Of course we had to go on the “Spaceship Earth” ride because it was sponsored by AT&T. That’s the golf ball looking thing that’s in all the Epcot brochures. It’s not as big as I thought it would be, but I guess I’m not sure what I expected. I’d never given it much thought. Anyway, it’s all about the history of communication and was pretty interesting. The characters in there looked very lifelike and we couldn’t exactly figure out if they were real or not. We decided that they were mannequins that looked almost real and the ones at the “American Experience” show that we saw later were real that looked and moved very wax-like, thus looked like mannequins.

We walked around the lake and saw all the countries represented. Each one had some sort of music or dancing or something going on in front of it. At the Canada stop, there was a man carving an enormous totem pole out of a huge cedar log. It smelled wonderfully potent and we talked with him for a bit and discovered that he was actually an Indian from Ketchikan, Alaska! Go figure. So, yes, we had to get a picture with him, too.

We stopped to get a bite to eat and while we were snacking on some Mickey shaped chips and salsa in front of Mexico, the most incredible creatures came along and captured the attention of all three of us and held us completely captive until they had walked on by. They were so beautiful and intriguing that we all felt hypnotized just looking at them. I’ll try to describe them for you, but it’s going to be really hard. They were actually just people in costume and make-up that were walking on stilts. But it appeared that they were riding on the back of an animal that looked like a cross between some type of dinosaur or ostrich and a peacock, because they were really bright colored. They looked like something you’d see in an exotic jungle somewhere. They were about the size of an adult ostrich and very elaborately decorated. They were made entirely out of one inch bands of metal, so they had a cage-like appearance to them, and you could see through the spaces of the bands that they were made of. The stilts were the animals’ legs and then there were fake (but real looking) legs hanging over the sides that looked like they belonged to the “rider.” The riders used a series of “reins” to move the animals’ heads and bodies around to make it look like they were looking at something in the sky or eating something off a tree and the way they moved was so lifelike that it was absolutely mezmerizing!! Definitely something so creative that you’d only see it at Disney. It was absolutely amazing. I couldn’t get enough pictures of them, they were so gorgeous and captivating.

That evening we went to a buffet on the other side of town that was all seafood and we stuffed ourselves on lobster, crab & shrimp. We were going to go to Dean’s hockey game (they were in town for the weekend playing the Orlando Solar Bears) but we were so full and tired that we couldn’t move. We decided we would just catch the ending of the game and say hi to Dean, but we didn’t get there in time for that either. He’d already caught the bus back to the hotel. Tim Paris, the trainer was still there packing up equipment, though, and he told us that most of the guys were headed over to Church Street Station, which is a street that’s closed off to traffic after hours and is just solid clubs for about 4 blocks. So we headed over there. We went into one club called Sloppy Joe’s for a while then decided to leave because it was too smoky. We never did see him and when I got home the next day, he told me that he WAS in the bar at the same time we were. We talked about a dance contest they had going on and both of us had watched it from the opposite sides of the dance floor and never did see each other! Oh well. Just wasn’t meant to be, I guess.

Our last day there, Sunday, we were going to tour the Tiffany museum, but it was finally warm out, and after breakfast (Colleen!) we just laid on some loungers by the pool and soaked up the sun for a few hours. Colleen and Kris chatted and I dozed. It felt so good, I love being toasty warm! On the way back to the airport, we finally got to ride in the convertible with the top down! It was a great weekend and I burned up about four rolls of film so the memories are forever documented! Thanks, girls, for a fantastic weekend! I’m really looking forward to next year already!

Back in Grand Rapids, things still hadn’t improved with my job situation and I decided I didn’t care to watch Wayne chew people up and spit them out anymore, so I turned in my resignation. He didn’t take it very well at first but later asked me to keep in touch, so I’m not sure what to make of it. I figured out that I wasn’t going to learn anything more by being there so it was time to make a change so I could keep progressing. I’m working on another position so I’ll keep you posted.

Dean and I found a club here in Rapids (called Tinseltown) that is similar to the one I told you about last month in Las Vegas where they have “dueling pianos.” They played a lot of the same songs, took requests, did a lot of the same fun stuff, but for some reason, it just wasn’t nearly as rockin and wild. There’s no dance floor and the guys are funny but not quite as energetic as the ones at New York, New York in Vegas. Still, it’s something fun to do on an occasional Saturday night.

Just a couple tidbits from the hockey world here: Gordie Howe was at one of our games recently and I got to talk to him for a while and get his autograph. He’s a pretty friendly man. Dave Allison, the Griffins head coach was fired and the General Manager, Bob McNamara is taking over double duty for the rest of the season. I guess Davy’s temper finally cost him. Dean has mixed feelings about the situation, but hopefully it will work out for the best. And the Griffins also have clinched a playoff berth so we’ll at least be in the first round of playoffs starting April 16th. As long as we’re winning, we’ll stay in the running, but as soon as we lose a round, everyone goes home for the summer and the winning team advances to the next round. Each round is seven games and whoever wins four of the seven, advances. The fourth and final round of play could go as late as June, but would mean big bonus checks for all the guys. Cha-ching!!! $$$$$ Wish us luck! Also, Dean came home with a new haircut the other day, a George Clooney / Ceasar style. I wasn’t sure, at first, but it’s a 90’s look, I guess, and it’s growing on me.

Also, I have to print a retraction that I forgot about last month. In December, I wrote about a Christmas party at Danton Cole’s house where there was a picture on the refrigerator of him and his wife and children sitting around the Stanley Cup. I saw him wearing a red jersey and wrote to you that he had played for the Blackhawks. Gerry Kroll immediately emailed me to inform me that the Blackhawks had the longest championship dry spell of any team in the NHL and Danton must be REALLY old if that were true. Ha. Being a hockey wife, of course, I feel foolish. It was a New Jersey Devils jersey, which is also red, and he played for them in the Stanley Cup championship in 1995. For you hockey historians, that was also the year Mike Peluso played for them. Mike is a childhood friend of Deans and a former UAA hockey player, too. Thanks, Ger, for the insight.

Okay, that’s the news for February. See you again next month!!
Much love,
Tiffany