Pandemic Park
Part One (Diorama Series): Created upon learning that the 2020 baseball season would not allow fans to attend games.
WHEN the news broke that baseball season would be but a dugout shadow of its former self, that fans would be replaced by cardboard cutouts and inappropriate cheers replaced with a soundtrack that sounded like static between radio stations, my heart sank. How could this be possible? Clearly, COVID-19 had made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the virtual and real. I imagined that semioticians emulating Umberto Eco would have a field day with the mirage of a new, two-dimensional form of simulated reality or reality without realism.
But, hey, there’s no crying in baseball. I had to do something. My Kafkaesque sulking evolved into a fit of Marie Kondoesque pique. I decided to clean the garage.
Almost immediately, I stubbed my toe against the sharp wooden edge of a silverware and napkin drawer turned on its side. We had kept the drawers, though the old oak buffet that had long since gone to the dump. The two side doors holding cups and glasses could no longer pivot on their hinges, and when I tried to close them, the legs wobbled so much that we feared it would collapse during a dinner party (remember those?). The drawer, leaning vertically against the wall, looked inviting. I imagined a stadium tucked inside its neat, deco sections. Voilá…I would build my own stadium.
And so…the time suck began.
I gave myself a $25 budget for miscellanea. The rest would have to come from what I would find in drawers and in the garage. I discovered a giveaway cigar box with enough bulletin-board letters to spell out Pandemic Park. An evening turned into a week, a week into a month.
The hand crank player piano ($6.99) has a dual purpose. It plays “Take me out to the Ballgame” and also doubles as a convenient hook for my face-mask. A baseball peeks out from the side of the frame, but it’s glued/stuck inside, like us. A catcher’s mitt (with a mask) is surrounded by a plastic pitcher and catcher, but no batter and a catcher and batter, but no pitcher ($2.99). No one is swinging weighted bats in the on-deck circle, a furniture pad. Above the circle, the ubiquitous “Stay Home!” order. To the right, a spring-loaded pin-ball baseball game with players frozen in their positions—as if from an earlier era—like last season (free, a gift).
Above the game are three stick-on circular furniture pads—one with a green bead (go), a yellow bead on another (caution), and on the third, the largest: a red crazy person with two hands up, warning people to stay away. Above that, a Dodgers banner, because…well…there should always be a Dodgers banner. I’ll explain all this soon if you haven’t lost track and gone to the refrigerator, but I would understand if you did.
Peek inside, and you will see two plastic dead people. I inserted the card of an early St. Louis Nationals player from a pop-up book about baseball ($2, library sale). I Sharpied a mask and added 1918 for our last pandemic. Quick lecture: according to the Pandemic Archive, “the Health Commissioner for the city of St. Louis urges citizens to avoid fatigue, alcohol, and crowds, and to get plenty of fresh air and to avoid those who are ill.” Do we ever learn? The panel on the right includes a headless player, the words “Yer out,” and a danger sign. A pitcher throws to a catcher, but there is no batter (bottom left). Behind them is a bank of stadium lights (ok..buttons) illuminating no action.
Near the top, a VHS box for the movie, “Damn Yankees.” As far as I am concerned (with or without a pandemic), it’ll always be Damn Yankees. Wink, in case you don’t get my drift: other countries follow public health instructions; we Yankees don’t give a damn. Gwen Verdon graces the cover—maskless, oblivious.
The large panel houses a $5 glove I snapped up at the local thrift store. I added a face mask and wedged in a paper bat souvenir from an “Old Timer’s Day” game at Dodger Stadium, where my family watched me scream myself hoarse because Sandy Koufax (my childhood hero…kinda still is) was there. I was turning 60. Back then, you could high-five complete strangers…even scream. Today, Dodger Stadium is LA’s largest Coronavirus testing and vaccine site.
Behind the glove is a copy of Koufax’s scouting card (from the same pop-up book). As it turns out, Koufax signed his first contract on May 15, 1954 — two days after I was born. The number “32” is pasted on the outside top of the frame (Koufax’s number). But I digress here. This pandemic has seriously addled my mind. Again, Umberto Eco: “cogito interruptus.”
The sawed-off end of a bat peeks out of the side of the frame, unusable like the ball at the bottom, holds a baseball tie one of my kids gave me. Why dress up? Where do I have to go?
Atop the frame and away from the action, a tiny ceramic Buddha cradles a yellow baseball bat. Buddhism’s four noble truths are at work here: the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. Heavy, I know. A lonely player, away from the action, crouches. Nothing is coming his way.
For that “museum” look, I cut to size a clear-plastic sheet from a frame picked up at Goodwill ($7.50). And there you have it—Pandemic Park. At 66, I had resorted to fashioning an 8th-grade diorama from an old drawer with enough hackneyed baseball metaphors to fill a stadium. Total: $24.50.
My testament to baseball does not include Donald Trump because I would have to look at him every time I sat at my desk. Hence, no orange peels for hair, no Trump heads for batting practice, no solitary figure perched on his single “base,” no McDonald's wrappers, no plastic TV playing his tribunal in front of the criminal court at the Hague for crimes against humanity—lives heartlessly stranded, struck out, swept aside, sidelined, stolen…and toes tagged. Sure, I long for America’s past-time (misspelled for its painful dad-joke irony), and vague MAGA, but when the going gets tough, the tough make dioramas.
An update since the election: we threw the bum out. If we’re able to start leveling the playing field (it even hurts when I read this), I vowed to build something more hopeful, hopefully around Spring Training (2021), using the frame holding the silverware and napkin drawer. I’ll be listening to a game on the radio, just like the ‘ol days.
Play ball!
