Wings for Charity

OK, let me take a short respite from travel blogging - and break one of my cardinal rules - by posting some non-travel related pictures. On Super Bowl Sunday night my good friend Andy Burkhardt, a librarian at Champlain and one of the founding members of the Gentlemen of Excellence social club, and I participated in one of the odder ventures I've ever schemed up (which is really saying something) - eating chicken wings for charity. It began very innocently, as most things do. Andy, another poor Viking fan, and I would meet at Ruben James in downtown Burlington to eat chicken wings and suffer our weekly football related humiliation. Anyway, for some reason at one point we decided that we should work up our stamina until we could eat 100 wings in the course of one football game, and we went into training. Luckily, at about this time, our good friend Faith Yacubian suggested that we do this for charity - which sort of ruined it for us, because we were mainly concerned about the purity of the wing-eating, but we went along with her idea. We were soon joined by our friend Cyndi Brandenburg, who teaches in the Core division with me at Champlain, and her husband Bill Vespa joined us - mainly because Cyndi, as we soon discovered is uber-competitive. Our charity was COTS, the homeless shelter folks here in Burlington, while Cyndi's charity was Women Helping Battered Women. We had the same goal, eating 100 wings - and we recruited a small army of amazingly supportive folks who pledged so much for wing consumed. At the end of the chicken wing carnage the Minnesota Wrecking Crew (Andy and my team) edged out the Brandenburg Gates 105 to 100 wings (I think we could have done even more damage to our internal organs, but we locked it up early - having eatern our 100 by half-time - and, much like the Colts, although with better results, phoned it in down the stretch). There was a lot of conniving and scheming which I can't really discuss here for legal reasons - anyone who has ever participated in a fantasy baseball draft with me would nod their heads knowingly - but a great time was had by all. The Burlington Free Press even showed up to cover it, and, in classic Vermont fashion, actually gave about as much coverage to the wing competition as to the Super Bowl itself. In the end we raised over $1200 for COTS and Cyndi and Bill raised around $700 for Women Helping Battered Women. We're already looking forward to next year's competition, although Cyndi says she will never, ever eat another chicken wing, so we may be looking for fresh competition. Many of our friends from Champlain showed up to support us, including the amazing Steve Wehmeyer who acted as referee, including stopping on the way to the competition to purchase an officials's jersey. An amazing time.