Paying My Last Respects

Yesterday the Seattle Supersonics’s mascot, Squatch, celebrated his 14^th birthday. A good friend of mine knows the guy inside the costume and gut us tickets to sit in his suite at KeyArena. Such is the state of affairs of professional basketball in Seattle that the mascot gets his own suite.

The game was a stinker – the Supe’s only scored 31 points in the first half, and made less than 1/3^rd of the shots they took. But it was fun to see all the mascots from other teams come in for the birthday bash. The best part of the evening took place when Chris Ballew of the Presidents of the United States of America (one of my favorite bands) took the stage and debuted the new Squatch theme song. It’s a little campy, but he wrote it overnight on short notice (a la Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein). Squatch played drums. We rocked out for 90 seconds then left the building. Should the Sonics end up moving out of town it would be a shame for the mascot's birthday to be my final experience with this local institution.