A sordid saga of supposedly sex for Series tix …

I just hate it when blog fodder turns up that’s so exquisitely preposterous that you just want to have fun with it, and then you quickly realize that it’s way too serious a matter to simply giggle about it. Such is the case of the Philadelphia housewife charged by an undercover police officer with offering sex in exchange for World Series tickets.

Of course, my natural tendency is to laugh and – as a Mets fan in reasonably good standing – make tacky jokes about the grotesquely one-sided quality of a transaction that ostensibly would involve trading something so sacred and beautiful (sex) for an opportunity to take part in a truly squalid and tawdry spectacle (the Phillies in the World Series). If you’re a Phillies fan, go ahead and switch the items in parenthesis around – it works either way.

With the softball jokes taken care of, I offer this bit of background from the Associated Press (in italics), in case you missed it.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, so I’m not embarrassed about my actions. I’m embarrassed about how I was arrested,” Susan Finkelstein told The Associated Press a day after meeting at a suburban bar with an undercover police officer responding to an ad on Craigslist.
Finkelstein’s lawyer said his client is merely “a nice lady overcome with Phillies Fever.”
She might have dropped double entendres in her Craigslist ad but never explicitly offered sex, her lawyer William J. Brennan said.

The 43-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate student wanted to take her husband to a game between her beloved Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees. The self-described “buxom blonde” said she was simply trying to score tickets online, as she had in the past. Over a few beers at a suburban bar, she told a police officer she needed two tickets, one for herself and one for her husband. No price had been discussed, and Finkelstein and her lawyer stopped short of recounting specifics of what was said before several officers sitting at a nearby table came to arrest her.
“I was hoping to get cheap tickets,” she said, “maybe meet someone, and talk, and bat my eyelashes and maybe get some tickets.”

Finkelstein faces a preliminary hearing in Bucks County on Dec. 3. On the bright side, she’s been offered a pair of tickets to a weekend game in Philadelphia, courtesy of a radio station and car dealer.

I am sure the media will be all over this one, but I can’t shake the aggravation that somebody charged with allocating public resources for law enforcement would have made a decision to dispatch undercover officers to a suburban Bucks County tavern to engage with this woman.

Bucks County ain’t exactly the slums, but if they are so starved for suitable assignments for their officers that they get reduced to this then I would suggest the funds could be better directed elsewhere.

Go Phillies!