The first assignment:
Read this incredibly scathing review of Guy Fieri's Times Square restaurant from the New York Times. Your task is to write a similarly negative critique. Your target can be any number of things: a restaurant, another business like a pool or a mall or a bowling alley, an event like a concert or a sporting event or a high school dance, or some general trend you've noticed among your peers or another segment of the population.
Like this review, your entry should be written entirely in a series of rhetorical questions. You should attempt to match Pete Wells' outraged tone, but otherwise, you should strive to find your own voice.
Length should be between 500 and 700 words.
I'm not sure if my response turned out to be a personal essay or a piece of flash fiction, but here it is. Inspired by a composite of coaches and parents, with whom I've come into contact during my years as a wrestler and a coach.
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To the Dad in the Bleachers, Watching the Wrestling Tournament at the Overlea High School Gym
Have you ever found your life as fulfilling and meaningful as it was during your senior year of high school, when you were the co-captain of the Middletown Hawks wrestling team? Did you cut seven and a half pounds that year, to make it down to the 135-pound weight class? Was the best part of cutting weight that you got to crack the varsity lineup, or that you liked hearing yourself say to girls at parties, "I can't drink that; I have to cut weight for wrestling"?
Did you have a hard time coping with the premature end to your season, and to your athletic career? Did you suddenly feel that after being ignominiously bounced from the district tournament (by a sophomore, no less), that you had no sense of purpose and a confused sense of identity? Is that what inevitably happens when, for eight years, you define yourself as a Wrestler? When you have seen your win-loss record as the very measure of your value as a man?
At what point did you begin single-mindedly pursuing your goal to have a son who could carry on your aborted wrestling legacy - to avenge you, like some sort of medieval squire, by making it out of the Districts and into the Regions or even (dare you dream it?) the States? Are you proud of Mason now that he's a senior? Or, because he's better than you ever were, have you found yourself trying to swallow an unexpected resentment? Do you feel weirdly helpless during his matches, and is that feeling of helplessness what causes you to shout so vociferously from the opening whistle to the closing buzzer?
Do you think he hears it when you call out, "Throw the arm bar!" and "Chest to chest!" from your spot in the bleachers? Do you think he finds some extra motivation late in the third period when, in a voice loud enough for his opponent, and his opponent's parents to hear, you scream, "This guy's got nothing! He's gassed!"? Are you pretending not to notice when, after each of your shouts, Mason's coach turns his head about seventy-five degrees to the right, as though he's trying to decide whether or not to reprimand someone else's unruly child, making a scene in a restaurant?
Have you noticed other parents' increasingly labored smiles, when you reliably find a way to shoehorn the subject of Mason's most recent match into every social interaction? Or what about their naked grimaces during the match last week, when you berated the referee whose failure to penalize the other team for stalling resulted in Middletown's third loss of the season? Did you choose to interpret their silence as a show of solidarity when you told that overpaid, overweight piece of crap, "You're not even man enough to admit you're wrong!" Did you say it for Mason's benefit? To show your boy that you cared about him and the fortunes of his team? If you said it for him, do you think he was able to hear it with his earbuds in and his hood pulled up?
Are you going to be ok next year when your son goes to college? When you're no longer spending your weekends in high school gyms, and scouring the online forums for the latest area rankings? If he decides he's done with wrestling after he graduates, will you two recover? And if he somehow wrestles out of his mind for the next month or so, if he - why not say it? - if he wins a state championship, will you feel happy for him? Or happier for yourself, because it will represent the triumph of your gene pool?
What will you do if, after you finish feeling proud of him and pleased with yourself, you start to feel a little empty? Because your son accomplished everything you wanted to accomplish your senior year of high school, and now what?
