E-Mail This Article to a Friend Boston goes batty Varitek slaps A-Rod, the Mayor consumes second-hand smoke, and a reporter nearly chokes to death on a potato BY CHRIS WRIGHT

SUNDAY, JULY 25, 2004 -- For me, the weirdness started early.

On Saturday morning, I was standing at a bus stop in the South End when I was approached by a large, bearded man carrying two large bags. "Do you live around here?" the man asked. When I told him I did, he said, "Do you know what a Red Sox ticket looks like?" The man then pulled two tatty tickets from his wallet and held them out for my perusal. They were for that day's Red Sox-Yankees game. Right field roof. The man, who was visiting from San Francisco, explained that he'd found them on the Boston Common the night before. "Someone must've dropped them." Someone dropped a pair of Yankees-Red Sox tickets. The man seemed unaware of the significance of this.

I too attended that day's game. On the way in to Fenway Park, I started to get jittery. I looked at the faces of the people milling around me — the smiling, happy faces — and was reminded of that scene in The Sum of All Fears, at the football game, right before the nuclear bomb goes off. Of course, the only act of violence at the game occurred when Jason Varitek slapped A-Rod in the face with his mitt. By the sixth inning, with the Sox 9-4 down, suitcase bombs seemed like the least of our problems. My friends and I left in the eighth, the Sox trailing 10-8 and playing like the miserable frickin' bums they are. Besides, I had the Boston Globe's Media Party to attend. On the Green Line afterwards, someone said the Sox had come back in the ninth to take the game 11-10.

The Party. For those who couldn't bear the thought of the 10-minute walk from South Station to the new Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, there was a shuttle bus. Media People jammed themselves aboard and chattered into their cell phones while video screens played a looped propaganda film extolling the virtues of Boston. The theme of the film, as I remember it, was "Momentum." There was little in the way of momentum about the bus, though. We sat there for what seemed like a decade. I tried to engage a guy in a conversation about the Sox's amazing comeback, but he seemed unmoved by the topic, so I returned to "Momentum," which was showing someone rowing along the Charles. Finally, the Media bus started rolling. You got the sense that many of the people aboard were thinking about vodka.

From the outside, the new convention center looks like an airport terminal, circa 1968. The inside, too, leaves you gripped with the urge to ask someone directions to Gate 13. The place is massive — you could take day-long hikes in it. You could go camping. To get inside, the Media People made their way down the widest red carpet I've ever seen — possibly 30-feet wide — and through a gauntlet of official greeters. "Hello!" they cried to the left of us, "Welcome!" from the right. No one seemed particularly interested in returning these greetings, which I thought a little rude. "Hi!" I said as I hurried along the wide carpet, grinning and whipping my head back and forth. "Thank you!" Not only was it embarrassing, it kind of hurt.

There seemed to be about 75,000 people at the party, but the Globe puts the figure at closer to 10,000. There was a Ferris wheel in the larger of the halls, and dark-skinned people wearing colorful native costumes — feathered head-dresses, skirty things — moved through the crowds. As one Media Person pointed out, the message seemed to be: "Boston: No Longer Quite-So White!" At one point, as I waited in line to be fed, a native woman's garb brushed up against the table, and I had to pick yellow feathers off my beef. Later, when I remarked to a woman that this was the biggest party I'd ever been to, she looked at me as if I'd told her I've never tasted butter before. "Really?" she said. "I've been to much larger parties." I asked her where. She said LA.

If there were indeed only 10,000 people at the party, they probably consumed enough booze to inebriate an entire city, and its outlying districts, for a week. The Media People who were actually working the thing walked around with expressions of discomfort. One woman, who was writing a society piece for the New York Times, told me she approached a man and asked him who he was. "The publisher of the New York Times," he said. I, meanwhile, contented myself with going up to people and saying, "Are you on television?" Later, I lit up a cigarette next to Mayor Menino. I figured when the ceiling's more than 300-feet high, you're essentially outside.

The most interesting part of the night — more interesting than the chocolate fountain, more interesting than the marching bands — involved a colleague of mine. He'd been eating a potato, and had started to choke — seriously, life-threateningly choke. Gripped with panic, my colleague forgot the universal symbol for "I'm choking!" — which, he explained later, consists of putting one's hands around one's throat in a throttling motion — and instead tried to mime the Heimlich maneuver, which confused people. Eventually, a guy from the Denver Post gave him the Heimlich, possibly saving his life. The worst part of the whole thing, my friend said, was having to go and pick the piece of potato up afterwards. "Demeaning," is the word I believe he used. Weird.