Page 1: Home

Page 3: Derby People

Page 4: The Horses

Page 5: The End

We were not only late, we were clueless. Seems it's an hour later in Louisville. Oops. It was 3 or 4 in the afternoon and we were swimming upstream against the drunk people leaving the track. We didn't even have tickets; Mary Lea likes to wing it (she always managed to watch the race from a box seat, though). Apparently I like a bit of a plan. Apparently I'm a bit more uptight than I imagine myself to be.

Some fellow, in spite of his wife's disapproval, stopped on the sidewalk and offered us his tickets and armbands ("C'mere," he said to her, and ripped the band right off her wrist). So suddenly we had official grandstand seats (worth a few hundred).

We entered the infield side of the track. Everyone looked like Brittany Spears' slutty white trash cousin. "Hey sexy, thanks for comin'," a bleary guy said. I'd already worn off the skin on one foot. (Damn my princess feet! Every time I travel I end up limping within 24 hours, trailing band-aids.) We walked through the tunnel under the track and the frat-boy crowd howled. I guess echoes are a new thing in Kentucky.

One hundred eleven thousand people were betting and dropping paper on the ground. We fought to our seats and watched a race, which consisted of craning to see the starting gate, about 6 seconds of identical flashing horses packed together, and then watching the uncertain finish on the giant low-resolution stadium screen (see photos below).

When we got home Mary Lea's boyfriend made the mistake of asking who won the Oaks. "We don't know," Mary Lea said, "but Jennifer bought a cute T-shirt."

We decided to try to find a patsy to take us up the Magic Elevator. Or sell us Derby tickets for the next day, at least. We tried to look glamorous, but were branded by our yellow wristbands, I suppose. We split a mint julep for lunch and finally plodded through the glass to the car.

The Kentucky Oaks, from the grandstand

Mary Lea's boyfriend, a self-made success story and NASCAR fan (she calls him her "Jewish hillbilly") had spent the afternoon racing go-carts and had slammed into a barricade at 40mph. He was home on the sofa in intense pain. We spent the evening researching internal injuries on the Internet and trying to determine if he was sweating or pale yet. Strange how unaware most of us are about the location of our own internal organs. He seemed to have injured his spleen, stomach, or liver, but being a normal Stubborn Male Person, would not go to the hospital.

"I'll call my sister," I said, "I think she's a trauma nurse."

I explained the situation to my sister. "Well, I'm not a trauma nurse," she said, then advised a trip to the hospital.

The next day the Stubborn Male Person wasn't worse and was planning on going into work. So we abandoned him to drive down the highway to the Derby. First, though, Mary Lea explained the symptoms of bleeding out, ending with, "Then you shit blood and die. Bye, have a great day!"

Mary Lea (or "Peach," as her family calls her) and I spent three days driving back and forth on this flat, green-grass-fringed highway, talking. That was the best part. She survives, as I said, on conversation and cigarettes. (Unfortunately, I don't, so I survived on breakfasts of Pringles and graham crackers, as evidenced by the crumbs all over the passenger's seat, and lunch was usually a mint julep). We discussed knee-jerk politics, academia, racism, parenting, family dynamics, and buying boots. Both of us love to read, have a dry sense of humor, and don't care too much what people think. Our backgrounds, however, are wildly different, although neither could be considered perfect. She uses phrases like, "He was from a good family in Indianapolis," "bought my way into college" (a joke), "pearls my mother gave me for my birthday," "my family's land," "he's a surgeon," and "Chanel suit." I use phrases like "couldn't afford to," "divorced when I was 13," "made it myself," "scholarship didn't cover cost of living at Harvard," and "I got it at Ross." Of course we both use the F-word.

We changed into our derby outfits in the nicest rest stop I've ever seen, somewhere on the Indiana/Kentucky border. We entertained three black girls with colorful hair styles, who couldn't believe that general admission was only $40. Maybe it was because the 4-carat flawless diamond in Mary Lea's engagement ring is the size of a dime. I put rollers in my hair and stuck my head under the hot-air hand dryer. (Mary Lea has Chanel pumps but no blow dryer.) "Will y'all take your picture with us?" the technicolor corn-rowed girl asked. I said ok, as long as I could keep my rollers in. Somewhere there's a photo of a very interesting rest stop crew.

The parking lot on Derby Day, by the time we got there, had spaces. And even more empty Jack Daniel's bottles. Some guy said, "Those two look like models." That made up for the astonishingly dishonest lighting in the rest stop, which had revealed nose hairs visible from 10 paces.