![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/colin08.jpg\" "\\"colin08\\"")
<\/a>Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? <\/em>Who knew the baseball that dribbled past Red Sox star Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the \u201886 World Series vs. the Mets was picked up by sweet, shy Charlie Sheen, pre-tiger blood, in 1992 for $93,000? In May 2012, it sold for $418,250.<\/p>\nMaybe you\u2019ve met this ball. It\u2019s mentioned in Good Will Hunting<\/em>, Fever Pitch<\/em>, and Celtic Pride<\/em>. What isn\u2019t mentioned so often is, after the Series, Buckner came to the woods of Maine to lick his wounds, at the Isaac Randall Inn in Freeport. Here\u2019s a moment for a long look in the mirror. Maybe he went to Wolfe\u2019s Neck Woods State Park and watched the gulls drop mussels on the rocks. What would you do? You find yourself and move on.<\/p>\n It\u2019s so ditzy, the way Super Bowl winners say into the TV cameras, \u201cI\u2019m going to Disney World!\u201d Maine\u2019s role as the nadir of this phony effervescence makes our culture darker\u2013Stephen-King dark\u2013and certainly more fascinating when you think of the people who come here to brood.<\/p>\n But, seriously, Groucho Marx<\/em>? Though time remembers Duck Soup<\/em> as a triumph for the Marx Bros., audiences of 1933 hated it (ahead of Woody Allen\u2019s loving reference to it in Annie Hall<\/em>). One New York Times<\/em> review sniped that far from being intoxicating, Duck Soup<\/em> employed \u201cthe bludgeon\u2026more often than the gimlet.\u201d The whole show was \u201cextremely noisy,\u201d not \u201cnearly as mirthful\u2026\u201d as fans had hoped.<\/p>\n \u201cGroucho needed to lick his<\/em> wounds,\u201d says film professor Wes Gehring of Ball State University. So he set out for Maine to duck the brickbats and get his groove back.<\/p>\n The Marxes rented a cabin on the shores of Wesserunsett Lake (Room service? Send up a larger room)<\/em>, according to a 1996 story in Yankee<\/em> by Tom Field. <\/em>Here, Groucho and son Arthur played tennis, foreshadowing the younger Marx\u2019s brilliant career as one of the greatest tennis stars in the country and a rival of Bobby Riggs.<\/p>\n Can you imagine Groucho staring into the lake between sets, counting fish?<\/p>\n What a surprise for Lakewood Playhouse when, in the dark of summer, Groucho slipped in for a look. Naturally, they snapped him up \u201cto star as Oscar Jaffe in a summer run of Twentieth Century<\/em>,\u201d Field writes. Missing Manhattan, Groucho \u201ckept tabs on the world via a six-party telephone that\u2026rang just once,\u201d Arthur (later a writer for My Three Sons<\/em> and All in the Family<\/em>) recalled to Field, \u201c\u2018when our landlady called up to say that if our dachshund didn\u2019t stop eating her chickens,\u2019\u201d she\u2019d give their family pet a two-barreled tour of metropolitan Skowhegan with her shotgun.<\/p>\n You bet your life Groucho could have lit her up with a comeback (I never forget a face, but in your case I\u2019d be glad to make an exception)<\/em>. But did he suppress it?<\/p>\n Inspired, he rushed back to Manhattan and shot A Night at the Opera<\/em>, grossing $3M ($50.4M today). His Maine adventure? Up in smoke.<\/p>\n February\/March 2013 Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? Who knew the baseball that dribbled past Red Sox star Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the \u201886 World Series vs. the Mets was picked up by sweet, shy Charlie Sheen, pre-tiger blood, in 1992 for $93,000? In May 2012, it sold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-7369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-februarymarch-2013"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7369"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14463,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7369\/revisions\/14463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"