Because one of my secret alternative careers was to become an advertising copywriter (like my friend Dave), I’ve been paying close attention to the Super Bowl ads now available for preview.

I dig the flying Pringles mustaches and the Affleck brothers’ ad for Dunkin’ Donuts, and the ad where David Beckham discovers that Matt Damon is his long-lost twin brother. I am a big Matt Damon guy.

But this ad, for Michelob Ultra, just might be my favorite so far.

There are several reasons for this. O’Hara has been in many of the Christopher Guest “mockumentaries” (“Best in Show,” “A Mighty Wind,” for example) AND she co-starred with Guest’s collaborator, Eugene Levy, in “Schitt’s Creek.”

Her costar in this commercial is Willem Dafoe, who had perhaps the most epic movie death in history (“Platoon”) and was brilliant in a very small film, “At Eternity’s Gate,” about Vincent van Gogh.

My favorite role of his, however, is as the angelfish in “Finding Nemo.”

Also, as annoying as we are, the Boomers win one in this ad.



Oh, and the game? Kansas City is beautiful–it has hills!–and I visited the city several times when I was a student a Mizzou.

The connections go farther back: Kansas City operatives from the famed Pendergast Machine left a bank bag full of $5 bills on my grandmother’s kitchen table just before every election in Texas County, Missouri, in the 1920s and 1930s.

(The farmhouse is still there, but with a satellite dish.)

Grandma Gregory was the party’s County Chair. My teenaged Dad handed out the fives as voters, Hill People, proud and hungry and barefoot, waited to vote.

So I have a lot of very personal connections to KC.

My Grandma Gregory. I once described her as “a hard woman to knock down in a windstorm.” That’s accurate of me.


But I think I’m rooting for the Eagles. Saquon Barkley, dumped by the Giants, just might be one of the most amazing comeback stories in NFL history.


And, to be sure, the Chiefs will be back another year. How can I compare, as a history teacher, their QB, Patrick Mahomes, to Figures from History?

Okay. Here we go:

–Mozart
–Leonardo
–Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein.” Okay, and as Willy Wonka, too.
–Louis Armstrong
–Emily Dickinson
–Aretha Franklin
–Walt Whitman
–The opening paragraph to Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.”
–The closing paragraph to Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
–Linda Ronstadt

Yeah, Mahomes is THAT good.