Word: fandom
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...superhuman powers. These he employs to upset the elegantly balanced geometry of the game by lending his services to some perpetually losing club, thereby turning it into a perpetual winner. In these tales, individual dreams of glory -- permanently arrested adolescent division -- are fused with the mass yearnings of a fandom frustrated by years of suffering in the cellar with their local heroes...
Hard-traveling fandom has become a benign regional contagion. Loren and Tancy Frank packed up the Chevy Caprice last Sunday, drove the 550 miles from Laurel, Montana, checked into a Holiday Inn, walked over to the Rockies' gate, and bought tickets for back-to-back games against the other expansion team, the Florida Marlins. "Neither of us had ever been to a major-league game before," Tancy observes, "so we said, 'Why not?' " They'll be back. So will Karen Harris, who "wanted to see what all the ruckus was about" and motored in from Wiggins, Colorado, 65 miles away...
...says. "I think it has to do with small boys and numbers." He got hooked on baseball statistics at age eight and was drawn as well to election-return tables. He had already been notified by the Little League coaches of Norwalk, Connecticut, that he was fated to fandom rather than stardom on the field...
Foster could speak eloquently of the rank underside of stargazing -- of fandom fanned into fanaticism. Understandably, she does not speak on the subject (just last week she canceled an appearance on the Today show because Hinckley was to be mentioned), or on other aspects of her personal life. She knows that Hollywood movies are all about the marketing of emotion, and that it is difficult for actors, the onscreen vessels of emotion, to keep their lives sensible and their sensations private. Nonetheless, Foster is determined to separate public persona from private person...
...media culture that were made far more richly in John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves. One is left wondering -- not least because of an imagined conversation between a would-be assassin and composer Leonard Bernstein -- whether Sondheim's personal interest lies in the borderline between obsessive fandom and murderous envy. That topic might yield a far better show...