Hot dog doom

The first day of the Sundance Film Festival was another sunny day. There were more skier kids than I’d expected: about six. There were more instructors than that. Tameca started assigning everyone jobs like, “Stand at that door and be a greeter. You stand and greet people coming through that other door. You go up to 9990, do a few runs and tell me how the snow is.”

Kids trickled in and I was near last on priority but I still got work because someone else didn’t mind not working today. I got the Blue class. I started out with two; a smart eight-year-old boy named Ethan who knew that he wanted to practice hockey-stops, and a girl who had pretty terrible balance and whose father was Israeli. I spoke to him in Hebrew. At the shuttle stop I was given another kid named Will, who was dropped down to me from Double Blue because he was actually Green.

I found Marcelo at the shuttle stop too with just one Green boy, and we decided to ski together and see if we could equalize the levels between us. We did a short bit of High Meadow and discovered they were all pretty much the same. So I just gave Marcelo the two smaller kids in the orange jackets, for visibility convenience. That was his original kid and my girl, who he says he got turning well by the end of the day. Barry, the head of the ski school, would have a choking fit if he knew there were two instructors out with two kids each, all of the same ability level.

The boy I had dropped down to me was from Georgia, and had a thick Southern accent that got on my nerves, especially when I discovered I was perfectly imitating it to talk to him! He sang TV commercials on the chairlift. I spent all morning on High Meadow improving my boys’ wedge Christie turns, but not as quickly as I would have hoped so I kind of miss Juliette from the other day. At lunchtime the two of them wrestled and thumb-wrestled, and goofed around a lot together. They spent a lot of energy, and the Southern kid Will lay down on the bench and the floor instead of eating his food. He started kicking the other boy, and me, when we teased him about naptime. I caught a kick from his boot right in my fingers, which hurts, and I firmly told him never to kick anybody in ski boots again.

On the hill he kept bending over with his head below his knees whenever we stopped, so I thought he was tired. But I saw him bent over his stomach and eventually got him to admit he felt sick. He must have gotten some food poisoning: I blame the hot dogs, because I had a terrible stomach ache from them too. I guessed how sick he must be when we were hiking on our way to the top of Chicane, which leads to Tombstone lift. We had about an hour to go and I decided to turn back, even though Ethan wanted to ski it, because we wouldn’t make it in time at the pace we were going. So we hiked back up and I put him back in the rough, and by the time Ethan and I did a run down Snowdancer he was already gone, sent home sick.

Rinat and Eyal sent me a text that they were going to Whole Foods Market (an organic supermarket chain) for “a light healthy dinner” and invited me to join. I squeezed onto the 5:00 bus (many people were left behind) and joined them there for some supermarket sushi and a cookie. We opened up the trail map and talked all about the resort, too late since it was their last skiing day today. But it was very nice to hang out and talk to them.

Scott was invited to a house party by a liftie who lives all the way in Deer Valley. Four of us went in Josh’s car, and we stayed until about 1:00AM. I only drank one weak beer because I was exhausted before I even went there, and I played a game of pool, which I am very bad at. I didn’t know many people there and wasn't very sociable but I found Lucie, a cute French girl who I met at the internet café way back when we were both looking for places to live. She lives there now. It’s a really huge, well-appointed house, a much better party house than even ours.