{"id":90956,"date":"2015-10-16T14:26:07","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T18:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=90956"},"modified":"2015-10-16T14:40:30","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T18:40:30","slug":"luck-be-a-lady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/16\/luck-be-a-lady\/","title":{"rendered":"Luck Be a Lady"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"ladymet\"<\/a>

Lady Met, who may or may not be Mrs. Met\u2019s mom, or Mr. Met\u2019s mom, or his ex-spouse, or something …<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

You couldn\u2019t really see out of that big head, so you\u2019d feel someone on your leg but you couldn\u2019t see it, and I\u2019d have to turn my whole body and hold the head to look down\u2014it was a little rough. Later on, I often wondered what happened to Mrs. Met, and maybe they just thought it was easier not to have to deal with all that stuff that I dealt with.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The secret lives of mascots are always interesting, inasmuch as the job involves subjugating all ego in the service of a city\u2019s id. That\u2019s why Mr. Met rated a documentary on ESPN. But the quote above comes from\u00a0an interview with one Lynn Farrell,<\/a> who played Mr. Met\u2019s wife\u2014or his mother, depending on whom you ask<\/a>. This was Mrs. Met, n\u00e9e Lady Met, a mascot born early in the franchise\u2019s life. Farrell played the mascot in her seventies-era glory years.<\/p>\n

After some time away, Mrs. Met was reintroduced two years ago in a more modern form, which makes her story a kind of Christ narrative. It\u2019s what every mascot yearns for: the added drama of death at the hands of Mets management in the 1980s and modern resurrection. <\/p>\n

Although now she\u2019s ponytailed and generically clad, Lady Met used to look incredible: in addition to a biologically improbable red bouffant, she wore a Mets\u00a0bolero<\/em>. And presumably her chemistry with Mr. Met was off the charts. Reader, she married him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She was chic and, as her tale of sexual harassment at the hands of grabby Shea fans attests, she attracted the basest of lechers. But the affection we feel for our mascots is more (one hopes!) than just a fleeting physical attraction. When I think of the Mets, it\u2019s the way the ancients must have felt towards their nicer gods: they are all-powerful, yes, but essentially human in their desires and feelings\u2014and still completely benign. And they live only to\u2014well, not win, so much as rejoice. They are the secret part of us that thinks rooting really hard can truly help. And they smile either way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a poignant excerpt from the interview, the interlocutor asks Farrell if fans ever proposed marriage to her when she was in costume. \u201cNo,\u201d she says, \u201cbut some older men would say they were in love with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  You couldn\u2019t really see out of that big head, so you\u2019d feel someone on your leg but you couldn\u2019t see it, and I\u2019d have to turn my whole body and hold the head to look down\u2014it was a little rough. Later on, I often wondered what happened to Mrs. Met, and maybe they just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[375,19826,19828,14130,7054,19827,13028],"class_list":["post-90956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-baseball","tag-lady-met","tag-lynn-farrell","tag-mascots","tag-mr-met","tag-mrs-met","tag-new-york-mets"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLuck Be a Lady: Remembering Lady Met, Mrs. Met\u2019s Predecessor<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on Mets mascot family history.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/16\/luck-be-a-lady\/\" 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