On Saturday, we arose at an alarming 5:30 am, showered, lathered on sunscreen, and made our way to Wimbledon. The tournament holds 6000 tickets for grounds admission each day, but if you’re interested, you need to get there early, and so we did. We arrived at about 7:45, walked to the end of the line and picked up our queue cards. That’s right, queue cards. Now don’t be confused – these are not CUE cards, which tell you what to say next (although I did have quite a giggle pretending to be Dave Letterman and read from mine for a while). Rather, queue cards tell you where you’re supposed to stand in the queue. I think it sounds much more Wimbledony than “line cards.�

Anyway, Andy and I were numbers 2667 and 2668, I believe. After pretending to be Dave got boring, we read for a while, got some food from the church fundraiser along the line (GENIUS idea, by the way), read a bit more, and eventually, three or so hours later, found ourselves on the other side of the fence! WHOOPEE!! WIMBLEDON!!

I watched quite a bit of Wimbledon throughout my life, and I remember having “breakfast at Wimbledon� with the family, which basically meant cereal in front of the TV at that time, but as it turns out, all that watching of Wimbledon earned me a pretty solid knowledge of Wimbledon pomp, circumstance, and tradition, all of which the tournament has – as they say here – in spades.

After inspecting the order of play and determining that we are most decidedly out of touch in the tennis department, we made an immediate pit stop at the strawberries and cream stand. £2 bought us a gorgeous Styrofoam bowl of beautiful Kentish strawberries with rich cream and sugar. It was most certainly £2 well spent.

Post-berries, we had a little exploration around the grounds and quickly realized that Wimbledon is JUST as pristine and exquisitely attentive to detail as we ever could have imagined. The buildings and grounds were covered in thousands upon thousands of deep purple flowers, and there were some areas of the club that we could see but not get to. You know – the “here’s what you COULD have if you were a little bit richer, cooler, more famous or better at tennis� type places. They were beautiful, from what we could see.

I read an article today about the “unsung heroes� of Wimbledon. It talked about the groundskeeper, who has special grass-cutters that only cut horizontal growth, so that all of the blades of grass point up. There was an interview with the man who paints centre court – they cleverly call him Stumpy, because he’s short – he said he always watches the TV coverage looking for spots that he missed, and the bit I liked best is that he likes to sing to himself while he paints. He must be a nice man. Only nice people sing when they’re alone. The article talked about the lady who grows the strawberries, the man who strings the rackets, the head steward and the ball-kid trainer. I enjoyed reading about the contributions of all those people, but I certainly wasn’t surprised to learn about them. Wimbledon just oozed care out of every little nook and cranny.

Incidentally, we also saw some people play TENNIS!! We watched a few women’s singles matches, a few men’s singles matches, a men’s doubles match and a few mixed doubles matches. The weather was extremely hot and sunny, which was wonderful, if perhaps a bit – well – hot. The most exciting match we saw was between Fernando Gonzales (seeded 10th) and David Ferrer (ranked 23rd). The match went to 5 sets and was close throughout. There were NO seats in the shade, so we sat in the sun. It was an exceedingly sweaty experience, but the match was most certainly worth the mild discomfort, and I felt better when I realized that I was most certainly not the stinkiest person in the crowd. (It may have been Andy, though. Kidding.)

After that match, we paused for a beverage and walked around a bit more, and when we did, we saw John MacEnroe! He was wearing a suit and fancy shades, and my goodness he has that Hollywood swagger down pat. He signed an oversized tennis ball for a little girl without looking at her or breaking stride. Very impressive.

Then, about 30 seconds later, we saw Martina Navratilova. Only SHE was geared up for some tennis playing! We eventually found out where her match was and went to watch her play. I naively assumed that it would be an exhibition match (and the lady at the information desk distractedly confirmed this), but we found out later that she is playing in both the mixed doubles and women’s doubles tournaments. Holy moly if ONLY I could play world class tennis at the age of 50. Actually, it’d be pretty good if I could do that now. Or ever. One other thing about Martina’s match was that her competitor was unhappy with some line calls, so he started yelling at the chair umpire. He knew enough not to say any bad words, so he just kept saying – well, yelling – things like, “You STINK! You STINK! You can’t be SERIOUS!� So funny. You Stink? That’s the best you can come up with? Geesh.

We also saw Lisa Raymond play mixed doubles, and I like her, because she’s from Southeastern PA like us. We also saw Andy Roddick walk by right before he lost to Andy Murray. That struck me as funny and I enjoyed pretending that everyone was cheering for the Andy I know. Go ANDY! ANDYYYYYY!!! HAAAAhahahaha.

OK, here are some pictures of us at Wimbledon. . .