Sunday was a busy Boston day, which began with a morning run from Aimee’s place to mine and back, in order to get the tickets for the day’s events that I had left at home. It didn’t take any longer to run than it does to drive on a bad traffic day, and the streets were pretty empty at 8 on a Sunday. After a delicious Zathmary’s egg sandwich, we checked out wedding invites at the Paper Source mega-store on Beacon St., and then headed down to Fenway.
Yesterday’s game was the first we’d been to this season, and the seats were probably the best I’ve ever had there. We were in the first row of the grandstand, behind home plate, looking straight down the first base line to right field. The game was fine, pitched well by Tim Wakefield and poorly by pretty much everyone the Blue Jays put out there, but the atmosphere was pretty charged as the crowd slowly noted the presence of the very Presidential-looking junior Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. John Kerry. Aimee had spotted him, and his daughter Vanessa, wearing bright green, about fifteen or twenty rows ahead of us. We then had fun playing “spot the Secret Service guys,” men with earpieces in suits, Hawaiian shirts, and Red Sox staff uniforms who were conspicuously not watching the game. Kerry walked up past us in about the fourth inning, to lots of applause and scattered boos, shaking hands and posing for photos on his way. 
We though he’d left for good, but after we took a walk, he was back, and stayed to the end of the game, at which point he went on the field and into the Sox’ dugout, with lots of photo ops and autographs on the way.
We took a walk around the new additions to Fenway, the “Big Concourse,” featuring lots of food, picnic benches, and tvs, where there used to be parking – a nice move on the part of Sox management. The design scheme, all pseudo-retro imagery and clean pricelists in Copperplate type, was fake but harmless, I guess. Plus a massive men’s room, apparently the biggest one in baseball.
After leaving the park, we strolled past Aimee’s soon-to-be new home on Comm. Ave., and ate a nice meal at the Island Hopper restaurant; sadly, no photos of TC’s helicopter charter service of the same name. After a drink at Bukoswski’s (smaller, and somehow quieter, than its Inman Square brother, though it gives off a much rowdier attitude), we walked to Berklee for our 8:00 date with the Magnetic Fields.
After opener Andrew Bird treated us to multi-instrumentalism, live multi-tracking, and the most impressive whistling we’d ever heard, the four members of the band walked on stage and sat on chairs and stools. It was, as Stephin Merritt predicted, “the quietest amplified show you’ve ever been to.” The show was a treat, and featured some of the strangest on-stage banter I’ve heard, and a feeling and mood unlike any other concert I’ve been to. We heard “Book of Love” and “Busby Berkeley Dreams,” as well as some great sounding songs off of the new “i,” so we were happy.
On our way out the door I recognized Jeff from CTY, whom I hadn’t seen since a random happy hour probably four years ago at some strange bar downtown, and we introduced significant others and caught each other up on work and things. Strangely enough, in his group of friends was George’s friend Eileen, whom I don’t think I’d really seen since Easter before last when we hid rude Easter eggs in her Brookline neighborhood. She congratulated Aimee and me, which was nice, but had to run and we didn’t have a chance to chat. Small world strikes again.
To top it all off, I stopped by the Empire Museum in the Odd Fellows’ Hall (a.k.a. The Dance Complex) in Central Square on my way home from the concert. It was smaller and less interesting than I had expected, with an idea like that and all of the hype it had in the Globe on Sunday.
It was an appropriate kind of disappointment, though, as half the pleasure for those visiting cabinets of curiosities like Barnum’s back in the day was to be swindled, and to marvel at the persuasive power that got you inside, even though what you saw once inside wasn’t that exciting. 
