Supercheesebowl

It’s not too late to talk about the Superbowl, is it? Where should we start? Perhaps with Gisele Bundchen’s fierce Tiger-Mother support of her man, Tom Brady, while throwing his teammates under the bus? Or the commercials that gave us every inch of David Beckham’s body to flog his new range of underwear and the steamy Teleflora ad assuring men that Valentine’s flowers are a sure-fire way to score?

After fifteen years in New York, I can get pretty excited about baseball but the whole American football thing still goes over my head. From what I see, a team of men in body-hugging Lycra, huddle, charge, body slam and fall down. My ignorance of the finer points of the game may be of my own doing, but let’s not quibble over the obvious similarities with sumo wrestling which, strangely enough, hasn’t spawned a national following.

This year, with the Giants in the Superbowl, instead of my perfectly planned Sunday evening idyll, (read: wine, sofa and Downtown Abbey), I was thrust into a real Superbowl party, my first since January 1996 when the Steelers played the Cowboys. And there it was, flutterings in my chest, the first stirrings of pride as the NY Giants emerged victorious. I may be rehabilitated yet.

When Beckham was purchased to spice up LA-Galaxy, an American sports commentator bravely explained the American apathy towards soccer. ‘The beautiful game’, football by any other name, couldn’t hold American audiences because of the low scores. Since soccer games can end nil-nil or be won with a single goal, it doesn’t ignite the fires of a North American audience, even while it drives the rest of the world into passionate histrionics.

I have another theory. It seems the breaks in American football are as important as the game itself. Not only do they provide the outrageously expensive commercial spots designed to keep the audience glued to the box, they provide ample opportunity to graze. Nothing says time to grab another beer like a first down at the fifty-yard line. And at the end of the day, what would the Superbowl be without cold beer and buffalo wings?

Coccadotts, a local bakery in Colonie, NY obviously worried that cakes might not be an automatic go-to item when attending a Superbowl party. Inspired by the game and the national obsession with abundantly iced cupcakes, (who is buying these anyway?) they came up with six packs of cornbread cupcakes, iced with blue cheese frosting, and jauntily topped off with a saucy chicken wing. Heaven save us all. Cakes merged with chicken limbs? Sacré bleu!

Half time brings the other great sideline sport, the half-time show. A delicacy we love to pick apart with the same care given to those lip smacking wings. After the oldies cried foul over Janet Jackson’s Nipplegate, and the youngsters cried, “Who?” to The Who, the powers-that-be came up with a cross-generation act. No, not Lady Gaga, but Madonna. Madonna’s entrance bedecked in Givenchy Couture and Bulgari jewels had about as much pomp and circumstance as the royal wedding, something Madonna and her faux-British accent no doubt enjoyed. The medley of eighties and nineties hits was a fun little reminder that the writhing woman before us is actually in her mid-fifties. Alas, the stiffness in her dance moves suggested all the Botox may have migrated from her face to the rest of her moving parts.

Luckily for the censors, Madonna pulled off a near-perfect Madonna and Child performance without even kissing sassy Nicki Minaj, even if the other enfant terrible, M.I.A., did raise eyebrows by flipping the bird. No doubt she’ll be suitably chastised. In case you think the only scandal was in the post-game potty-mouthed tirade of Ms. Bundchen, we can thank some New England Patriots fans for bringing a little old school hooliganism to the streets of UMass Amherst. And lastly, a website named Hollywoodilluminati.com claims Madonna managed to disguise a Satanic ritual in her NFL half-time show. If she did, I have to believe the utterly sinful Coccodotts Bakery was in on the act.