FOOLCiRCLE

OK, so last Saturday (09.19.09) I was down at Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, DE for the 5th Annual Intergalactic Bocce Tournament, and it was just as bizarro as ever!

If you want to see the rest of the pictures click here.

So once again the Erik Mitchell Band was invited back as the “Bocce Band” to play everyone’s favorite show of the year, the Dogfish Head Intergalactic Bocce Tournament. Fortunately for me, for this gig in particular, I have been dubbed essentially an honorary member of the band. My main “duty” as being in the band is to hopefully be able to borrow the van from work (which I was able to), help set-up and break-down equipment, and take pictures to document the day. All while enjoying several refreshing Dogfish Head beers and hanging out with the freaks. I think I can handle that! From the bands perspective this is quite a “big” gig in the sense of the amount of time they play and the amount of songs they play. This year they started roughly around 1:30PM and finished roughly around 8:00PM, so like 6.5 hours. They played 4 sets, with at least 12 songs per set, except for maybe the fourth set. Each set was roughly 1.5 hours long, so in the whole time frame they really only took less than an hour break spread throughout. So, if you’re interested here is a copy of the 2009 Dogfish Head Bocce Tournament Set List from the show, enjoy.

Besides the band, there was so much else going on! This tournament is a total freak fest in the best way possible. When DFH talks about doing things for Off-Centered People, these are their people. We ran into lots of familiar faces like Tom and Eric from Punkin Drublic with a crazy new Amish theme, Jim and John from Midas Touch My Balls who were the old guys last year and this year they were the old guys widows (with obituaries and everything), John Deere Flava Flav, T-Pain, and Shawty Pimp from the Pallino Pimps rockin out their nautical “I’m On A Boat” theme, Lee (Nacho Libre) and the rest of the Alpha Males kickin a construction theme with man hole … covers, and of course last years champs Bonsai Bocce running with the same theme as last year in their Karate Kid gear, plus Real Fake Tits and his crew from Mama’s Roast Beef were rolling with a German beer girl theme, and Sam and his peeps were crazy cross-dressing bocce lovers … anyone else in the freak show? Oh yeah, Motley Brue with Nikki Fuckin’ Six Pack were back after being gone last year and being Motley Jue the year before that, so they were kicking their 80’s glam rock gear, Knights of the Malted Balls (2009 champs!) had there same knight gear on, Beer Junta (I think that’s their names) had a Mad Scientist type thing going on (sorry if I’m mixing two teams together), the Bocce Beer Monks were there again but by the time Saturday rolled around their team was basically out of costume just relaxing, also Jebus was back again with the Holy Rollers rocking out a baby Jebus and the three wise men type theme this year, and Cat Bird Ass Brewery switched things up and were bikers this year, I think they changed their name too, but I can’t remember to what, and of course the winning team from Arizona from the DFH West Bocce Tournament these guys had full size fabric Dogfish Head bottles for costumes, they looked pretty cool, and I think the last team was a group of architects and/or engineers who have been working with Dogfish Head to redo the exterior of the brewery, look at the pictures to see what I mean.

I spent a lot of my time hanging out with the different teams that weren’t actively playing, and hanging out with some of the Dogfish Head staff, so big hey to Audrey, Marissa, Matt, and John. I also tried to take a bunch of pictures and actually filmed a couple short videos of the band too. With the pictures I originally was going to borrow Karen’s camera, but when she lent it to me we realized the LCD screen on the back was cracked, and with a digital camera that makes it much more difficult to see what you’re actually shooting. So I instead I used Erik’s camera, which worked out just fine. He also brought the video camera but the battery wasn’t fully charged. So I think (Erik has the camera so I am not sure) we have about 20-40 minutes of each the second, third, and fourth sets from the show. I actually can’t wait to see them no matter how poor the quality or short they are. The food I thought was also superior this year in my opinion. They again had it catered and lunch was cold sandwiches, wraps, chips, fruit, that kind of stuff and it was pretty good, and dinner was more hot food with a BBQ flair, ribs, pork sandwiches, all sorts of sides – yeah dinner was real good. It was actually smart for DFH to do dinner at Milton instead of Rehoboth in my opinion because it freed up their upstairs from all the freaks and didn’t overwhelm their kitchen with like an extra 60+ orders on a Saturday night. They also did the awards ceremony at Milton this year, which I assume went well, but the band was packing up their equipment during it as to not hold things up because we were already behind schedule with the buses.

All in all it was a great time, from the Friday night party before the party, or Bocce Eve as we have dubbed it, which we determined has the feeling of Christmas Eve and Mischief Night rolled into one – hyper anticipation, to breakfast at Timmy D’s (that’s for you Carson), to the ridiculous bus ride home (how often do you look forward to a bus ride?), all the way through the Saturday night mayhem. Yeah, that’s the cool part, just because bocce is over and we’re no longer in Milton doesn’t mean the fun stops. This year Erik announced during the show that we’d be showing our 3rd place winning movie from the Dogfish Head Film Fest  “World Wide Clout” back at our hotel room and essentially invited everyone back. Fortunately we only had like 15 people show up, people from all sorts of teams, the architects, the pimps, the old ladies, and I think the construction guys. Then after the WWC showing and hanging it was time to raid the Dogfish Head brew pub again, so we were down there enjoying ourselves for a while. And of all things bizarro we ran into a couple from Austin, TX who also had entered the Film Fest who happen to be at the pub and recognized Robert and I. I swear, with how crazy everything was that day it seriously felt like we imagined them there, the timing was just crazy. Oh, he also announced about our silly shaving bet with Robert, so hopefully that sparked some interest there too.

So, not to make this post any longer, I’ll leave you with a couple links to even MORE pictures if you are so inclined to look at more drunk cross dressing people playing bocce :). First are pictures from Jimmy Balls from MTBM here. Next are the pictures from the “unofficial” Dogfish Head photographer, Jess Daleiden,  for the bocce tournament, you can find Friday’s pictures here (which is the day we were not there) and Saturday’s pictures here. If anyone wants more just ask, there’s always more from this event. And in case your interested, re-caps of the past: 2008, 2007, & 2006 (sorry no 2005).

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Beer, Side Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.