Medora Goes To The Game

We found our seats and Medora almost immediately came down with an acute case of the hiccups. "Am I going to hiccup for the entire game?" she asked me.

"I don't know," I replied. "What do you think?"

She said she wasn't sure.

As the teams came out onto the field I opened up the pro gram to see who was who and discovered I had been gulled by a vendor into buying a Harvard Lampoon parody of the official program. The lead story was about a headless Yale player—Aemon Bonderchuk: "the horrible freak who hopes to lead the Elis to victory"—and, sure enough, there were some photographs doctored so that it indeed looked as if Yale had a headless player. According to the story, Carmen Cozza, the Yale coach, had been asked about him: "Aemon? Sure. Nice boy. Good hands. Big heart. No head."

I showed a picture of Bonderchuk to Medora. "Look at this. Yale has somebody out there with no head."

"How awful," she said. "Was it a Harvard person who did that to him?"

After a while she said that she thought seeing the headless player in the program had startled away her hiccups. "I'm cured," she said. She gave a sigh of relief and looked out on the field.

"Does Yale have its bulldog over there?" she asked, squinting toward the opposite sideline. When I said I thought so, she asked what the Harvard mascot was.

"A Puritan."

"What's a Puritan?" Medora asked.