Ill-fated filly and just as friends

The Derby party was in the Original Highlands neighborhood, near where I first lived in Louisville, in a funky old "camelback" house painted great colors, inside and out, with a grassy extra lot as part of it. Some of the same people from last night were there. The house is one just bought by our church's music director and her husband. Vincent is friends with their 9th-grade daughter. Fellow church session member Jason organized a kind of Derby pool in which we each pulled the name of a horse out of the hat. None of the three of us pulled the names of the three favorites (Pyro, Colonel John, and Big Brown with the unenviable far outside lane [#20])out of the hat, but Stephanie did get a horse (Adriano) that the jockey who rode Barbaro to victory two years ago rode. We also watched horses we did not get who were not among the top favorites: Visionaire (from Palmetto, Florida, across the Manatee River from Bradenton, where Stephanie and Vincent lived until three years ago (and Palmetto, where Vincent went to school in 8th grade) and Eight Belles, the lone filly in the race, who scratched from yesterday's Oaks race to take on the boys.

None of us had ever watched the Derby at a party, and certainly not in Louisville. We'd been watching much of the earlier races and preparation earlier in the day on TV. When they played "My Old Kentucky Home," some in the now crowded room at Lewis and Debbie's house sang along. Some of the early non-favorites - though not ones whose names we had picked out of the hat - led early, but then Big Brown came on strong at the head. Behind her was the intrepid filly, Eight Belles, who came in second. Brown's owners and trainer and jockey went crazy, but NBC soon noted that Eight Belles was down. Like most others in the room, we were horrified of course to learn that she had already been killed, after she broke two of her ankles in her first few steps after going past the finish line second. No almost yearlong struggle to heal her/keep her alive, as with Barbaro (whose story I had recently reviewed when I delivered a Barbaro-related invocation at a Toastmasters meeting two weeks ago). Apparently her injury was even more severe than Barbaro's. Already yesterday, after one of the Oaks races, one of the horses that raced then had been killed after the race (but not so dramatically and not after placing second in the main race). We're not big racing fans (except on this day) but it makes you think twice about the sport, just as when football players become paralyzed or die or boxers die.

A footnote to this party. After vowing for months not to go as a junior to the Brown School junior-senior prom, Vincent surprised and - we were told yesterday - asked, as a friend, the daughter of the couple who just bought the house, our hosts today, to the prom. Vincent has some complicated scheme to take buses and to avoid us giving them or him rides. He may be too resolutely anti-sexist in his outlook, that he doesn't have arrange for rides or pay for anything for her (he's got no driver's license, among other things). But we're trying to work it out with her parents (she's a 9th grader at a rival school where most of the kids from the church youth group go) and her about next weekend. And Vincent needs to do some research to find out some critical details like where the prom is, what time it starts, and what time a party he wants to go afterwards starts and where it is. Anyway, just being friends aside, the two of them were pretty friendly today at the party too, and this is a whole new thing for us to get to as parents. Perhaps we've got a teenager to work with in yet another way now.