Party Time. Excellent.

My alma mater is playing my wife's alma mater this weekend. I may have helped give our daughter a purple mohawk last week, but Charlotte needs to put that in the past, now, and get back behind Da's team.



After our game (which I must watch, as usual, in hiding) , and before the kickoff of everyone else's, is the first candidate-hosted party I've been invited to: the Robyn Jones Tailgate Party. That's at 6:30pm on Saturday the 29th at her South Bexley residence, 825 Vernon Ave. I'm not special. All Bexley's invited, and I'm sure the rest of y'all would be welcome.

Then on Sunday the 30th, while my (legitimately shameful) pro team is getting thrashed by my wife's pro team, Travis Irvine will be holding the second such party I've been invited to. The "Social" will take place from 1-4pm at his family's South Bexley residence, 729 College Ave. Mr. Irvine's campaign is asking for RSVPs at americanmayor@yahoo.com but I would doubt that spontaneous attendance decisions will be dealt with harshly.

Interestingly (at least to me) both candidates have explicitly used the sectional qualifier in their campaign materials. For those of you outside the area, a friend of mine who's lived on the east side much longer slipped the other day and referred to South Bexley as the "poor part of Bexley*." When I laughed at that, she explained that that was how her acquaintances in Bexley thought of South Bexley. Then she paused, amused, and stated that none of them lived in Bexley nowadays anyway.

That series of statements fits pretty well with my impressions and intuitions. I do feel some SoBe solidarity, and I have a bit of a tendency toward class agitation, so the candidates are probably gaining some small amount of ground with me by self-identifying. But does it help overall? I'm curious, and I guess we shall see.

*A rough look at real estate listings yields a current median asking price for single-family homes of about $499k in Central Bexley and about $209k in South Bexley. A considerable and noticeable difference, to be sure, but for someone who has lived in a wide range of circumstances over the lifecourse, it's funny** to me to think of a place like South Bexley as "poor," even in a relative sense.

** In case you were wondering, that's sometimes funny in the sense of 'ha-ha', but other times funny in the sense of 'strange', and under the right circumstances, funny in the sense of 'seething with righteous indignation at the complete lack of understanding of actual poverty.' Given the context, this time was actually just funny-ha-ha, mixed with funny-strange.