Cape

Friday May 23, 2025

It’s Memorial Day Weekend, and Lindsay and I are heading to the Cape for a wedding.

Lindsay’s co-teacher, MJ Crossman, and her fiancé, James Cantoni, are getting married in Dennis Port on Saturday, but Lindsay and I are, well, either on our way or already there by the time you read this on Friday.

What do you want me to say about Cape Cod? Great mini-golf, great seafood, shitty Chinese food, shitty traffic. Lindsay’s in the wedding, so she’s ocupada all Saturday morning. If I weren’t a self-conscious coward, I’d probably golf Saturday morning before the wedding, but I’ve never gone solo out of fear I’ll get put into a group of people who know what they’re doing. Instead, I’ll probably find some breakfast place, eat an omelette, and drink a Bloody Mary at an irresponsible hour. Maybe mini-golf. The Cape is the Mecca of Mini-Golf.

The wedding will be fun, though. The venue looks beautiful, and all of Lindsay’s teacher friends are fed up with school, so you know they’re going to be a rowdy bunch. As of Wednesday night, I’m strongly considering going with a mustache. Did I do it? Who knows?!

One Hollywood: Summer Catch

I’m not ashamed to admit I loved this movie in high school. I haven’t seen it in 15 years, probably, but I bet I’d… I’d probably hate it. A rom-com set around the Cape Cod Baseball League? Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jessica Biel? Matthew Lillard losing his mind over wooden bats? What’s not to love? The 8% Rotten Tomatoes score goes to show you can’t trust the critic class.

One Quote: “The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.” - Henry David Thoreau

Massachusetts is a funny place. In some ways, you can still see the land that inspired transcendentalism. In others, Walden Pond is surrounded by four-lane highways. The Cape is a bit like that. The sand dunes are famous and some of the beaches are spectacular, but much of the coastline has been privatized and the land reclaimed by golf courses and mansions. Now, I certainly can’t complain because my aunt and uncle own one of those mansions on the Cape Cod National Seashore and I reap those benefits from sowing absolutely nothing. They don’t have a private beach or anything so it’s not like they’re taking something away from people since anyone can wander through the salt marsh that is public land, but, you know, let’s make more parks, huh?

One Book: In The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick

This isn’t really a Cape book since the Essex set sail from Nantucket, but some of the sailors aboard were from the Cape and others hated everybody from the Cape so there’s your connection. Nathaniel Philbrick is a good, accessible historian in the David Grann vein. This book is about the true story that inspired Melville’s Moby-Dick. It’s wonderfully researched and, although there’s no Ahab, the characters and psyche it captures are fascinating. The real whale is almost more interesting than the fictional one, as sailors journaled about this thing protecting other whales and targeting individual whale boats before it decided to — successfully — ram the Essex into critical damage. Fucking terrifying.

One Food: Steamers

One of my favorite things to do when we’re at my aunt and uncle’s house is wade into the salt marsh at low tide and dig up steamers. They’re basically clams, they just look a bit different than the ones you get fried. Scooping these things out of the mud, yelling “CLAM!” to whoever is out there with you, and throwing them on a grill until they open up and you can pull them out and dip them in butter is a religious experience.

One Place: Pirate’s Cove Adventure Golf

Couldn’t tell you the last time I went to Pirate’s Cove, but the next time might be tomorrow. I will mini-golf alone, especially if it’s at Pirate’s Cove.

One Song: Daði Freyr - Think About Things

Eurovision was this past week. This international music competition gained some popularity in the U.S. after Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams made a surprisingly good movie called Eurovision in which they play a couple of hapless musicians who fall ass-backward into becoming the Icelandic entry for the famed competition. Basically, European nations submit one musical artist or group to create and perform one original pop song that is no longer than three minutes. In 1956, just seven nations competed. Eurovision 2025 had 37 participants. (Fun fact: ABBA’s “Waterloo” won in 1974, a key step in launching them to international fame.)

To be honest, the music in Will Ferrell’s dumb movie is better than most of what you’ll hear from the real Eurovision. But this entry from 2020 is an absolute banger and was favored to win before the show got COVIDed.

Anyway, enjoy the weekend!