I went to the Tribeca Film Festival in lower Manhattan last night, invited by my best friend to see a B-movie horror flic called "Satan's Little Helper". I love movies (who doesn't), and even took a 6-week course in filmmaking a couple years back. But I'm not a film groupie or festival-hopper, so the hoopla surrounding the screenings was new to me.

Pretty much anyone willing to stand in a line can attend. My friend and I were tagging along with a pair who apparently "knew people", so we were moved (literally) to the front of the line. That was pretty sweet; one of those rare moments in New York City were a Joe Average like me gets to feel a bit special, regardless of how banal that specialness really is.

I'd never met the two guys we were with, so all the requisite personal trivia was shared while we waited for the doors to open. Where do you work? How long in the city? After all that, my best friend quickly spilled the dirt on me. Alex is a big baseball fan! This seems to be a novelty, or at least curiosity, among a group of gay men (such as we were), kind of like declaring to your meat-eating, Midwestern-rooted family that you've decided to become a macrobiotic vegan. They don't know what to do with the information, but they'll politely play along.

At any rate, one of the guys began to compare opera with sports. I know, I know, opera -- sometimes stereotypes are true. "You follow certain singers just like you follow a sports team. You cheer for them to give a great performance, and when they don't... trust me, you boo." I know nothing about opera, but what he said seemed to make some sense.

In addition to his comments, my impression is that opera fans admire the genre's deliberate pace and the sustaining of emotion throughout all the acts. I'm not particularly keen on musical analogies to baseball, but baseball, at its best, shares some of these qualities. Game two of the Arizona series was a decent example; a well-played game in which fans withstood eight innings of expectation, leading up to a bases-loaded, 2-out, do-or-die situation. But often the games aren't as dramatic, or structured as neatly as a staged performance. The climax can come early, the denouement can last six innings. Yesterday's game, for example, was baseball not at its best, but at its most usual: some early drama, then a Derrek Lee-led fifth-inning bonanza that quickly turned it into a laugher. Which is fine and dandy by me; I'm not criticizing baseball for its freeform structure, just acknowledging that comparisons aren't easy to come by.

Matt Clement started rough yesterday, but quickly turned it around and was dominant yet again. Clement's early heroics are pretty exciting, especially given Prior's absence. Clement currently ranks second in the league (behind Wood) in Average Game Score with an awesome 63.3, and is fourth in the NL (seventh overall) in Baseball Prospectus's gauge of a pitcher's value, VORP. He's also doing well by traditional measures, with a 5-1 record and 2.29 ERA. If Mattie keeps it up, he'll be a surprise Cubs pitching addition to the All-Star game.

A final non-baseball note: Last night ended with a bit of dry humor, appropriate to a night out in the City. After the screening, we hopped on a shuttle bus that took us from the theater to our subway stop. It was one of those two-decker tour busses, complete with guide. In this case, our guide was a middle-aged artsy woman named Ellie -- a twenty-five year veteran of New York film and stage, and she came complete with a slight German accent.

We were sitting up front with Ellie as she told the commuters about the buildings in Tribeca. She peppered our journey with tidbits, but soon gave up. Her audience of hard-core NYC filmies was having none of it. "Over there to your left," she gestured, "is one of the most eco-friendly buildings in New York. They recycle all their water, and... oh nevermind, none of you care about any of this anyway." The travellers concurred, and with that she turned off the mike.

Cubs-Rockies, coming up in just a bit...