A FRENZY OF CONSUMPTION

LIONS PICNIC

A FRENZY OF CONSUMPTION

1995

Just beneath the surface in most men there lurks a real grub.  My wife offered this wry observation after I described to her the behavior of the men in attendance at last August’s annual stag lobster feed, hosted for over fifty years then by the Vinalhaven Lions. 

About fifteen years earlier a member with four daughters and no sons proposed that the Summer Visitors Night be a co-ed affair.  He was taken to the back of the Lions Den and subjected to an archaic embarrassment about which, as a member, I am not permitted to elaborate.  He was then stripped of his membership on the Marching and Chowder Committee and not allowed to sing the club song until his recantation had been recorded in the minutes. 

One August I, 1995, sat at Grimes Park with eighty other men at wooden picnic tables on a comfortable evening.  The park is a peninsula named for Fred Grimes, the man who bequeathed it to the Cassie Coombs Woodcock American Legion Post and whose continued existence is due largely to the women who are among its ranks and who graciously allow the Lions to observe their annual affair unhampered by the burden of political correctness which has brought so many men’s groups to their knees.  The irony was lost on us. 

We sit amidst piles of lobster, mussels and young corn, all steamed to perfection; so much food that it sometimes obstructs our view of one another as we settle naturally into gluttonous excess.  The pace quickens; a sort of anxiety builds.  Lobster tails are ripped from bodies; their contents expelled in a practiced maneuver, nearly staggering in its eroticism were it not for the casual and detached manner in which it is executed.  Claws are similarly separated and smashed with rocks or sticks, broken in pieces with bare hands often bloodied in the process, or simply chomped through by the rapacious diners.  Great gaping maws already overflowing with the world’s best white meat and more melted butter than they would have been allowed at home in a lifetime are crammed further full.  A frenzy of consumption is underway that makes hyenas around a fallen wildebeest look like dinner with Martha Stewart.  Someone might choke to death trying to feed on this level and talk and laugh at the same time.  No matter.  It would be worth it.  If everyone could laugh like this for a few minutes at the beginning of each day there’d be no wars.