Jennifer Keishin Armstrong - Seinfeldia

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Seinfeld is something I learned to do because I was given the opportunity. Then the show spiraled off into this whole other entity that I knew I had to serve because it had its own desire to be something.

Jerry Seinfeld

THE FOLLOWING NARRATIVES SCENES FROM the years Seinfeld was on the air are re-created with the help of dozens of personal interviews with those who were present, as well as accounts from newspapers, books, magazines, recorded interviews, and other research materials. I privileged uncut, recorded, archival interviews over other secondary sources. Ive indicated within the text, when necessary, who is doing the recounting. Scenes were checked by multiple sources when possible; dialogue comes from the accounts of those who were present. Full notes on specific sourcing are available at the end of the book.

THREE WOMEN IN BIG HAIR and flowered dressesplus another in jeansconvulsed on the grass near third base. Earth, Wind & Fires Shining Star pumped through the speakers of the Brooklyn Cyclones minor league stadium for the worlds most herky-jerky dance-off. Only one woman could be crowned the Best Elaine. They writhed and spasmed as if their lives depended on it. And this was exactly what the sold-out crowd of 7,500 spectators had come for. The baseball game was beside the point.

On July 5, 2014, the teams stadiumnestled within Coney Islands boardwalk and hot dog standsbecame its own carnivalesque attraction. A banner at the entrance to the field rebranded it Vandelay Industries Park for the day. The first three thousand fans through the gate got bobblehead dolls that looked like former Mets player Keith Hernandez. This meant showing up at least three hours early. There were reports of people later selling them for up to $60 to other desperate fans. (A year later they were selling for up to $100 via online auction sites.)

Inside, a lanky seventy-one-year-old with a backward baseball cap over his gray curls hocked ASSMAN license plates and MASTER OF MY DOMAIN sweatshirts. Among the many who threw out first pitches: an importer/exporter, postal workers, architects, a latex salesman, and a New York resident named George Costanza. If you do not understand why this procession of individuals was chosen, you did not belong at this game.

This bizarre parade of nonsensical characters and references made plenty of sense to those who had clamored for the tickets. It was Seinfeld appreciation night, and it was packed with activities that brought the shows trademark bouillabaisse of cultural references and inside jokes to life. The aspiring Elaines were reenacting the 1996 episode in which Elainethe only woman among the four main characters, and the only one with any clear career ambitionloses the respect of her employees when she dances absurdly at a work function. Vandelay Industries is the company that George, the balding schlub with a deficit of ambition, pretends to work for. Keith Hernandez famously played himself in a 1992 episode, becoming a sore point between Jerry, the shows main character, and Elaine, who ends up dating Jerrys longtime idol.

Never mind that this show went off the air sixteen years earlier. The game sold out weeks in advance, and the vast majority of the crowd was not there for baseball. Few people left even as the score shot farther and farther out of the Cyclones favor, ending up at an 182 blowout. Thats because almost every nonbaseball moment was filled with something far more fun: a Junior Mint toss, a cereal-eating contest, a marble-rye fishing race, a pick-or-scratch contest. In a presumable coincidence, the womens restrooms ran low on toilet paper. Some fans reenacted the Can you spare a square? Seinfeld moment, whether they wanted to or not, giggling knowingly.

Fans carried giant cutouts of Seinfelds and Hernandezs faces. One guy dressed like Kramer, with a bushy wig and a pipe. Another wore a jersey with the name KOKO on the back, an obscure reference to Georges least-favorite office nickname. Several puffy shirts of the kind Jerry once reluctantly wore appeared throughout the crowd, and on the teams seagull mascot.

Emily Donati, who had traveled nearly a hundred miles from Philadelphia to be there, had VANDELAY INDUSTRIES business cards printed up, with the fake e-mail address importer@exporter.gov and the tagline... AND YOU WANT ME TO BE YOUR LATEX SALESMAN ! She passed them out to appreciative fellow fans throughout the day.

Fans preferred talking Seinfeld with one another to watching the increasingly horrific game. By the fifth inning (score: 160), they were mostly concerned about how much longer theyd have to wait before the end of the game so they could participate in the promised postgame extravaganza: Every fan who wished to could run the bases, and people named Jerry got to go first.

This particularly consumed Jerry Kallarakkal. Hed gone to get a wristband that would allow him to the front of the line, but the woman hadnt even asked him for an ID. And theyd run out of wristbands, so she gave him a stick-on name tag that said JERRY . What kind of operation was this? Surely there would be hundreds of fake Jerrys out on that field after the game.

Then again, the boundaries between real and fake had dissolved long before this incident.

SEINFELD HAS A SPECIAL KIND of magic.

The Cyclones Seinfeld gambit was so successful that five months later, a minor-league hockey team, the Condors, of Bakersfield, California, had its own Seinfeld -themed night, with the players wearing puffy shirtstyle jerseys. And the Cyclones planned another Seinfeld night for summer 2015, packed with still more references: Kramers Technicolor Dreamcoat jerseys, a muffin-top-popping competition, a trash-eating competition...

Like those who filled the Cyclones stadium in 2014, almost every fan thinks he or she is the biggest Seinfeld fan. Like those 7,500 fans, many Seinfeld acolytes share an urge to express their fandom in some grand, public way; specifically, to interact in real life with the fictional world it created. Seinfeld created more ways to do that, more portals between its fictional world and reality, than the average show. Knowing Elaines dance, or the Keith Hernandez joke, or the master of my domain joke, is like knowing a secret passworda very widely known secret passwordamong the shows fans. Coming to Vandelay Industries Park that day allowed those 7,500 fans not only to reach out to other fans but also to interact with the very object of their fandom. They could meet the Soup Nazi or the real Kramer. They could be George or Jerry or Elaine or Kramer. They could, in fact, be all of them in the same day.

When it comes to all things Seinfeld , such strange intermingling of fiction and reality has long been status quo. Such was the power of this showand its staying power in constant rerunsthat its characters, settings, jokes, and catchphrases continue to intrude on our daily reality twenty years later. Fans may wake up on any given day in the 2010s to find that someone has made Seinfeld emojis; or a 3-D rendering of Jerrys apartment that anyone with an Oculus Rift can electronically walk through; or an online game that allows them to drop Junior Mints into a surgery patient, as once happened on a particularly bizarre Seinfeld episode. They can go to a college campus celebration of Festivus, the fictional holiday Seinfeld introduced, and even turn on the TV to find an earnest Fox News host debating the merits of Festivus as if our countrys future depended on it. They can attend a med school class in which students solemnly diagnose Seinfeld characters mental illnesses. In fact, almost from the beginning, Seinfeld has generated a special dimension of existence, somewhere between the show itself and real life, that Ive come to call Seinfeldia.