Drew, Babaloo, Barf and Boston

The Red Sox World Series victory last October shook my deeply held beliefs about fate and justice and the lameness of Boston. Boston's continued arrogance in the face of a century of failure was being rewarded, and I had to watch the snobby, insular New Englanders celebrate. For a city that's been in steady decline since 1773, those people can be pretty snooty. It's a city that is down to two relevant institutions, Harvard and "Car Talk," and only one of them is welcoming to women.

Even the Democratic Party, after this last election, has given up on them. I needed someone to commiserate with, someone whose suffering was more acute and quantifiable than my own. And there was no way I was talking to George Steinbrenner. Nobody is that big of a Yankee fan.

That's when I noticed that among the Red Sox hugging on the field of Busch Stadium were Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore. At first this upset me greatly, partly because it phonied up a historic moment, kind of like if Tom Hanks really stood there waving, like Forrest Gump, as Kennedy was shot. Worse yet, it reinforced the truism that the only way to get Barrymore to pretend to be your girlfriend is to be a former "Saturday Night Live" star. Kevin Nealon has a better chance with her than me.

But then I realized that the "Fever Pitch" writers were actually suffering far more than me. Though they had gotten Fallon and Barrymore on the field, their movie, which opens this weekend, had now lost its entire premise. It was supposed be to be about a guy who placed his lifelong, never-gratified love for the Sox above his girlfriend, Barrymore. Now that the Sox had won the championship for the first time since 1918, none of that would work. I may have been severely bummed about the Sox winning, but Fox was about to throw away tens of millions of dollars. I was feeling better already.

I called the screenwriters, "Babaloo" Mandel and Lowell Ganz, to see how they were taking the loss. To my great glee, they told me they were being forced to turn around a last-minute rewrite for free. I started rubbing that in their faces, until the guys -- who wrote "Splash," "Parenthood," "City Slickers," "A League of Their Own" and "Robots" -- said, "Frankly, we get paid enough."

Worse, though they both grew up in New York, neither shared in my Yankee suffering. Ganz was a Mets fan, and Mandel didn't have warm feelings toward the team either because of an unfortunate childhood incident in which he had to help his father clean his cab after a Yankee barfed in it. I thought that giving up love for the Bombers because of a little barf was pretty shallow. I worried for Mandel's children.