Bridge Blog 1096: Picnic Pickup

As I’ve said many times before, the Unit 116 picnic and game is my favorite unit event. Two games. Picnic food. You can’t go wrong.

Well, this year’s picnic, on Sunday, Aug. 4, was just one game. Maybe that’s just as well. Two is an endurance test.

And the picnic food, although once again it was that wonderful Weidner’s chicken, it was missing that special touch that Paul and Linda Zittel brought to the meal in previous years – the fresh corn and the fabulous corn salsa.

Still, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it. And I nearly did. Although I bought my $15 ticket weeks in advance, I couldn’t line up a partner, ask as I might. And although I requested the night off from work, the schedule at The Buffalo News showed me working as a city editor Sunday night. I figured my request had been turned down.

So it was great surprise on Saturday night to see that the schedule had changed. Someone else would be Sunday night city editor. I was free. I immediately called the chairwoman, Betty Metz, and explained my situation. Did anyone need a partner? She gave me two names, two women I’d never played with before.

I called the more experienced of them, Fran Kurtz, and she accepted. I told her, alas, that I do play two-over-one, but we agreed that we would have a good time. And we did, despite mistakes on both sides of the table. We had a respectable finish – 49.69%, seventh out of 12 North-Souths. A couple more good hands and we would have snagged a fraction of a master point.

The Unit 116 Junior Team

Meanwhile, one of the proudest moments of the afternoon was the introduction of the unit’s junior team, students from the Sunday lessons at the Bridge Center of Buffalo, who did very well a week earlier in the Junior Nationals in Las Vegas.

Fran and I got to play one of the pairs – Michael Passucci and Tyler Mu – and, aside from one bidding mistake (which didn’t seriously hurt them), they seemed to know their stuff. Among the kids, they were the best, the ones who earned master points.