My shirt was clinging to me like Saran Wrap on a damp watermelon. I was sweating like an illegal immigrant at a Pat Buchanan rally. The wilted breeze felt like an exhaust fan from a Florida swamp. I was loving it.
My first Reds game, spring of 1992.
All I knew about Cincinnati at the time was that people here seemed pretty sure this was not Cleveland, it was more humid than an Arizona thunderstorm, and if Cincinnati has any soul at all it sits in the blue seats at Reds games on a spring afternoon, sipping a cold beer and cracking salty peanuts while baseball makes its methodical music with leather and wood.
A woman who was slow-cooking in the sunshine next to me that day looked over the top of her stylish sunglasses and asked what I planned to do at The Enquirer. I told her. And she told me: ''They will never let you do that.''
There it is. The best and worst of Cincinnati in one snapshot.
The Kodacolor print shows no Detroit rowdies barfing beer and obscenities, no fossilized Tucson hippies protesting that hitting a cowhide ball is cruel to dead animals. Just friendly people enjoying a game together in comfortable, low-stress civility.
Cincinnati's family album is full of formally posed photos of good manners.
But the negatives are less flattering. From certain angles they remind us that sheep have good manners too, and they bleat too much about what ''they'' will allow and what ''they'' think is proper.
It's the opposite of the city I came from.
Tucson didn't give a soggy tortilla chip for what someone else thought or how long they lived there. People came and went, stirring up a spicy combination plate of conflict and creativity. No good idea went unpunished, no plan had a prayer, nothing got done, but nobody gave a dang - new homes and businesses rose every day like mercury in a thermometer. Our sun god was growth.
About 1,800 miles away is stable, grownup, dignified Cincinnati, where just two ingredients - black and white - sometimes seem to be more than either one can stand. People don't protest - it's not polite. They dress right (like each other), think right (like the boss) and behave properly in public (like Mom and Dad and the stone-faced ushers are watching).
But things get done because turning big decisions over to a few corporate executives is a lot more efficient than slow, sloppy, naked democracy.
At least that's the way it seemed when I got here. Lately, Cincinnati seems to be developing a stiffer backbone to stand up to the corporate bosses - or maybe the bosses are just growing bone-weary of carrying all that lumber for inept city council members who can't be trusted with power tools.
First, ordinary citizens forced a vote on the Aronoff Center for the Arts, actually said no - and nearly killed our new downtown treasure. The best strong-mayor plan money could buy was rejected when voters refused to let the Cincinnati Business Committee prescribe shock therapy for our schizophrenic city government.
And now the stadium tax is being attacked in a very impolite, un-Cincinnati way, by a gang that would rather lose pro sports than allow even one half-cent to slip into the pockets of team owners Marge Schott and Mike Brown.
Let's face it, the anti-tax economic argument is laughable. A half-cent is invisible. You don't see shoppers with hacksaws cutting pennies in half to make exact sales-tax change at McAlpin's. Pennies are so useless we leave them piled up in trays near cash registers. Even kids are too proud to pick one up off a sidewalk.
The politics is just as ridiculous: a motley crew of sour-grapes union leaders who failed to extort all the stadium-construction jobs, joined in mutiny with class-warrior Democrats who claim they have a secret ''Plan B'' after years of flunking Plan A. It figures they'd get it backwards, B before A.
No, take away the politics and prices and the only gripe left is principle. After years of being told what ''they'' will allow, that lady in the sunglasses is ready to jump out of her seat, run onto the field and stop the game if ''they'' won't let her play.
I don't blame her. The downtown ''in-crowd'' can be excruciatingly arrogant, like some student council planning a dance without asking anyone but the cheerleaders and football players.
Voters have a right to be steamed. But at least the student council planned something. Staying home proves nothing. The vote Tuesday is like a prom date: saying no is a one-chance mistake with unlimited regrets. And the anti-tax crowd is like those guys from shop class who spent prom night in their jeans and leather jackets, smoking in the parking lot. They'd sell our city's soul to Cleveland to get even.
Here's a better idea. Let's pass the tax, and attach that new backbone to a head with a real brain inside.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
