Poker Posts, Sneaker Shopping and Hollywood Kickball

I played a couple of sessions of live poker this week at the Commerce Casino and Hollywood Park. You can read all the gory details in these pieces I wrote for my PokerWorks blog:

The Jack of Nothing
The Slowroll

On my list of roughly three dozen things I have to accomplish before leaving L.A. for two months in Vegas is "buy shoes for WSOP." If I've learned one thing covering tournaments for the last year, it's that a pair of cute pointy-toe flats won't cut it when you're running around a casino 16 hours a day. I have to buy some sneakers. And I am not a sneaker person. At all. When I wear sneakers with jeans, I feel frumpy and unfashionable. And I'm not prepared to feel frumpy and unfashionable for two straight months.

I went to the Beverly Center yesterday to see if I could find a pair that didn't offend me. I looked at a few pairs of Converse tennies, but they never seem to fit me correctly. Everything at Sketchers was bulky and busy. And forget about Lady Foot Locker. You will never, and I mean never, catch me wearing white trainers with my dark jeans. I refuse to become bad WSOP fashion! One of the salesgirls could sense my growing frustration and told me to check out a couple of places on Melrose. So a trip up there will likely find it's place on my list of late afternoon errands, which include getting all my summer clothes dry cleaned, unclogging the bathroom sink that Showcase has left standing water in for three days now, and making a second attempt to screw my newly arrived license plates onto my car. This is one of those simple tasks I mentioned in #7 that I tend to fail at spectacularly.

I made some good karma with my weed dealer yesterday. When he paid me a visit, he was so stoned himself that he left an extra bag of product on my coffee table. I called him up to let him know what happened, knowing that there was a significant possibility that he'd be too lazy to drive back across town to fetch it. Sure enough, he said "it's your lucky day, I guess" and I scored a freebie bag of Juicy Fruit. He was also completely shocked that I'd told him about his mistake.

"You're an honest woman, Change. I appreciate that in a client." he quipped in his lazy surfer-speak.

Showcase is playing on a kickball team in Hollywood. His second game is tonight and I just may show up with a sign and some pom-poms. Last week, in the first out of the first inning of the first game of the kickball season, Showcase was standing out in left field when the ball was kicked high and long. It was coming straight at him. And he thought, "am I really going to fuck this up? On the first out of the first inning of the first game of the kickball season?" Is that my destiny?"

He caught the ball. And the crowd went wild. Well, not really but you know what I mean.

Showcase described it as the proudest moment of his athletic career. "It was the first time in over 10 years that I voluntalily participated in athletic activities and I didn't walk away wanting to cry. Which I usually do."

Unfortunately, the team lost anyway. But Showcase looked good in the process, which is really all that matters when the whole team is comprised of narcissistic Hollywood actors, D-people, and hangers-on. A certain sometimes-poker-playing C-list celebrity is on Showcase's team, but he didn't show up to the game. I wonder if they'll kick him off if he flakes again tonight or if quasi-celebrity status waives that rule?