News World Wide (!) Pairs Game
No Afternoon Game, Friday, June 1
 The Secret is Out |
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| Annabelle Hills | ||||||
| Wednesday, August 11, 2010 | ||||||
OK. Now for the revelation of the secret. Gerry Panos and I attended the NABC in New Orleans. We wanted to bring some of the flavor home to our club members. So today was New Orleans Day at the club. We had cornbread and jambalaya; Dixieland music, and beads, beads, beads. Following is a speech I made to our members: A good time was had by all!
Spring Hill, FL New Orleans About 10 years ago, Mary Ann Dufresne and I went to our very first tournament. We were both new to the tournament scene and literally shook in our boots as we played. It didn’t help when the lead director was called to our table and announced in what seemed to me to be a booming voice that “No player in his right mind” would have made the bid I did. I got the last laugh on him, I now play at tournaments with his mother. Mary Ann and I learned in time that tournaments are fun and the people that play are just like the people we play with at our club. We had no reason to be frightened. As most of you know, Gerry Panos and I spent 6 days at the New Orleans NABC. We enjoyed it immensely. The game schedule was superb and we were within walking distance of many New Orleans attraction.We stayed at the Hampton Inn on Carondelet Street, about 5 blocks from the host hotel and walked to and from games every day. When we walked back at night, we usually passed bands playing in the streets. Both hotels were on the edge of the French Quarter. When we weren’t playing bridge, we enjoyed walking through a large part of that district getting a bird’s eye view of Bourbon Street, Jackson Square, Saint Louis Cathedral and the Harbor district among other things. We had stopped at a tourist information center on the way into town and were told taking the Green Line trolley was a must. Most of the trolley lines in New Orleans have red cars; only onehas Green. The Green Line’s route went down Carondelet Street for two or three miles, then returned on Saint Charles Avenue. This, we were told, covered the most beautiful and historic section of New Orleans. The Green Line just happened to have a stop at the end of our block so was very convenient. We didn’t know if we could afford to take the trip, but finally coughed up the fare. It was $1.25 unless you had a Medicare card. 40¢ with the card. We were not surprised to find that at the end of the line you had to come up with another 40¢ to get back. The tournament itself was well organized and well run. There were interesting speakers every day for which we paid the Bridge player’s favorite price. They were all free.There were events for every level of play. A player could play among his peers or "play up" and find herself sitting at the table with Jeff Meckstroff, Mike Cappeletti, or one of a host of other professionals. That’s a singularly remarkable thing about the game of bridge. Ask a golfer if he ever expects to play on the same hole or even the same course with Arnold Palmer, Phil Mickleson or Tiger Woods. You could find many of the faces you see in the Bridge Bulletin among the faces in the crowd. I brought back a couple of the daily bulletins for you to look at and a schedule of the events. There were beads everywhere. That’s where Gerry and I got the idea of bringing some of New Orleans back to our club. The bead people kept prompting us to help ourselves to beads so help ourselves we did until we thought we had enough for a game here. Of course we didn’t take them all at one time. We made many “beadless” trips to the bead tables.Some sort of food was served every day. Sometimes ice cream bars, once the universal pizza night, and on several occasions a small cup of a Cajun or Creole rice dish. Have you ever thought about who you might like to be stuck in an elevator with? Well, whether my choice was Gerry or not, we were stuck in an elevator. Don’t let this get back to Gerry, but the only time I let her operate the elevator from our 6th floor room, the darn thing acted funny, went about 8 inches and locked up. Gerry wanted to know what we were going to do. I was busy reading the wall. Sure enough there was a little door marked telephone with instructions on how to use it. We made our plea to be rescued and hunkered down for the wait. The repair man ended up having to try every elevator in the building before he finally found ours and saved us. Total time: about 30 minutes. Result: that night free at the hotel. Gerry thought I was incredibly smart to find out how to get us out of trouble. I didn’t try to change her mind. Truthfully, Jack and I owned a building with an elevator and so had some experience with handling elevator problems.I didn’t plan on using this forum as a travelogue, but as a way of telling you how much fun going to these tournaments can be. Hope you enjoyed my little surprise!Thank you to those who stepped up to help.
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