News

Illustrations by Lisa Rivard

It was 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 6, Derby Day 2006. I was tucked away in a back corner of Vincenzo’s, waiting for my dinner. Across the table was Matt Hartman — a fri/files/storyimages/I’d asked to join me on this particular adventure. We were tired, we were sunburnt, and at this particular moment, we were more than a little bit embarrassed.

“Who did you talk to?”

A woman — the manager, I presume, though I didn’t bother to ask — suddenly was standing next to our table, demanding details about our reservation. I told her I didn’t know who it was.

She named one of her male employees. “Was it him?” she asked, her voice stern. Apparently, these kinds of screw-ups were routine for the poor guy.

No, I told her. It was definitely a woman.

The manager thought about this for a moment. Then recognition washed over her face, as if a light had turned on inside her head, alerting her to the cause of this most unfortunate situation.

“I know who it was,” she exclaimed. “Oh, you shouldn’t have talked to her! She’s a ding-a-ling!”

I suspected that, whoever she was, she was also busted.

As the woman wandered away, apparently satisfied with the cause of this most egregious blunder, I turned back to Matt. He was laughing, which, of course, got me laughing, which turned the heads of a few of the establishment’s more highbrow diners. Already they were starting to fill the place, having come down from their perches in the Derby stands to dine among other masters of the universe.

And then there was us. Hidden away in a back corner, nearly guffawing at the circumstances that would have our food cooked and delivered in record time. At the /files/storyimages/of the evening, I checked the ticket and saw that we placed our order at 7:24; our food was on the table at 7:35. That must have been some sort of land speed record.

I looked at Matt and asked, “Well, what do you think?”

“I think they can’t wait to get us out of here,” he said, cracking up again.

All of this, it occurred to me, over a simple pair of pants.

You want to go to Derby?”

The voice on the other /files/storyimages/of the phone was that of my editor at Louisville Magazine. For a moment, I thought I’d heard him wrong — after all, it was barely 9 a.m. and his call had woken me up. Certainly he wasn’t calling me Thursday morning, barely 48 hours before Derby Day, to tell me they hadn’t yet assigned a writer?

“Here’s what we were thinking,” he continued. “There’s a sense around here that if you don’t buy your tickets, reserve your hotel and make your dinner reservations almost a year in advance, you can’t do Derby. So we wanted someone to try to do the whole package on a last-minute lark.

“What do you think? Are you in?”

So began the adventure. Within an hour, I had my buddy Matt on the phone; another 30 seconds later, he was in. Matt is the quiet type, the guy you never suspect when mischief is afoot, but probably should. Because he also was the guy who sat in the hotel lobby after my wedding reception, drunkenly attempting to persuade total strangers to join him for a wicked night of town-painting.

He and I had a simple assignment: Call around and find tickets, find dinner reservations and — because we live in Evansville, Ind.— find a hotel room. Then, when it’s all over, sit down and tell the story of how we pulled it off.

Ready. Set. Go!

I’m looking for tickets to the Kentucky Derby.”

I’m proud to say that no one made fun of me that day. Or, rather, no one derided me while I was still on the phone.

My editor didn’t give me an exact budget for buying Derby tickets; he simply implied that, if the tickets (without dinner or the hotel room) would cost the magazine a half-grand or more, we could have a problem.

Without that restriction, I suspect I could have landed tickets in the grandstand. My first phone call, of course, went to Churchill Downs; I figured this story would be better if I got someone on the record with their fits of laughter. Alas, the woman was polite — if a bit incredulous that I even dared ask — simply telling me that they were sold out and suggesting that I call earlier for Derby 2007 tickets.

In retrospect, I probably should have ordered them on the spot.

Next, it was on to the ticket brokers. I started online, hitting eBay, where any number of grandstand tickets were on sale. Some were immediately out of our price range, with bids already in the thousands; a few offered two tickets for sale in the $300 to $400 range. So I signed myself up for an eBay account and placed my bids on those.

Then it was time to get on the phone. I lost track of all the ticket companies I called; there were probably five or six. Most would sell me tickets in the $600 to $1,000 range per ticket, which was out of our pre-set range. Another offered them for $300 a pop — not a bad deal — and I seriously considered it until I learned that they merely gained us access to a tent, with no actual view of the track. For a collective $600, Matt and I would want to see a horse on Derby Day.

So it was back to the Internet, where I learned that my final eBay bid of $560 for two tickets had been outbid by almost $700. With that depressing bit of news, I realized it was time to start exploring hotels. We could always cough up $40 for a spot in the infield.

As it turned out, though, hotels weren’t much easier to book. My mother always taught me to aim high, so I started with the major downtown properties — the Brown, the Seelbach. Again, no chuckling on the record, but I’m sure it came when the receptionists hung up.

Actually, I got the same response all around Louisville. It wasn’t until I left the city, calling across the river to Jeffersonville, that I landed a Quality Inn room for $139 a night.

Ouch. But it was the best we could do, so I called Matt. We were on.

It was in that spirit of aiming high that I called Vincenzo’s on Saturday morning, Derby Day. It was around 11 a.m., and Matt and I were driving toward Churchill Downs, ready for our little adventure.

The woman I spoke to at Vincenzo’s was incredibly polite. She told me the restaurant did, indeed, have reservations open, at both 7 p.m. and 7:30. We took the 7:30 (for which we would arrive quite early), and I asked if our dress would be appropriate — no ties, my khakis, and Matt’s khaki shorts. She said there was no dress code, and our attire wouldn’t be a problem. We were good to go.

The Derby itself is something of a blur. I remember the line — waiting for what seemed ages to hand over $40 in cash — then walking through the gate, disappearing under the grandstand, and resurfacing on the infield. There were booths everywhere purveying food, drinks and candy. And the betting areas, which Matt and I hit for every race, were loaded with folks hoping to strike it rich.

But what I remember most was how inappropriately we had dressed for a day in the infield. Not only was I hot in my long pants, but neither of us had worn a shirt with a sexual connotation; nor had we brought girlfriends wearing clothes three sizes too small. Of course, we wouldn’t have fit in upstairs, either; the only time we saw the clubhouse folks was when they stepped from their boxes of privilege for a breather, gazing out over the infield the way folks gaze at the animals in a zoo.

Thinking about it now, the Derby presents a fascinating sociological dichotomy: the men and women upstairs, dressed to the hilt in their suits, their ties, their spring dresses; the folks in the infield baring their chests, their midriffs and their libidos. (The guys using T-shirts to announce themselves as “Amateur Gynecologists” may have been the least subtle of the lot.)

But I suppose, at Derby, one must dress according to how many high-priced Thoroughbreds will witness your fashion faux pas. Those in the grandstand could be seen by every win, place or show, so they wouldn’t want to off/files/storyimages/by underdressing for the animals’ big day. Matt and I, on the other hand, got only a fleeting glimpse at each race as the runners galloped along the back /files/storyimages/of the track, popping up between the heads of the people in front of us.

Fortunately, that did nothing to dampen our enjoyment of the day. Sure, it was hot, and certainly we didn’t get to see much actual horseflesh. But we got to place bets on every race and we shared the excitement among a throng of people, all of us screaming and cheering at the tops of our lungs.

And frankly, regardless of religion, creed or T-shirt demographic, cheering for the same team, the same player, or the same horse is one of those incredible communal experiences that bonds us with total strangers. That’s what made Derby great for us.

It’s also why I didn’t care that I came out about $30 down (though it bugged me a bit that Matt, who wasn’t on the clock and thus was mildly inebriated, came out $16 ahead).

Yep, we had a blast. And then we went to eat.

That brings us back to where this story started – Vincenzo’s – and that little table in the restaurant’s rear corner. Despite our early arrival, the staff called our names immediately and started leading us into the dining room. Then the woman — the one who would later interrogate us about who offered us our reservation — stopped us on the way in.

“We can’t seat him,” she said, pointing to Matt.

I asked her why.

“He’s wearing shorts,” she said. “We don’t have much of a dress code, except for that — no shorts.”

I told her what the woman had said on the phone. I told her I had specifically asked about the shorts, and I had been told it was OK. And with that, two of the employees looked at each other and pulled us away from the main door.

It turns out Vincenzo’s has a back door to the dining room. And right next to that back door is a table in the corner. The staff took us there, behind Door Number Two.

I give them credit for realizing it wasn’t our fault and feeding us, no matter how quickly the courses came. Because the food was delicious.

“And,” as Matt would later say, “we got a great story to tell.”