Take Me Out

After years of angsty feelings for the Phils, Ronnie Norpel's back to rooting for the home team.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Mar 23, 2010

Neal Santos GRAND SLAM: Ronnie Norpel worked for the Phillies organization in the '80s, playing every role from ball girl to girlfriend.

[ books/visual art ]

It all started with a curse, but not the one you think.

Ronnie Norpel — a local poet, painter and actress whose "ficto-memoir" Baseball Karma: The Constitution Blues is being released next week by Three Rooms Press — was seduced by baseball's allure at a young age. She put that passion to use, working on and off for the Philadelphia Phillies from 1980 to 1986 as a ball girl, saleswoman and market researcher. "I was a rookie usherette when the Phils won their first World Series, but I wasn't allowed to work the Series because I'd left my regular-season duties early [to start my] Ivy League edumacation," says the Wharton business school undergraduate program alum with more than a hint of sarcasm.

After returning to the Phils from Wharton in 1984, Norpel began to feel that her hard work for the team — from recovering lost snot-nosed kids to upping the ante on corporate season-ticket sales — had gone unappreciated. "So I put a curse on them," she laughs. And as anyone keeping score in the '90s could tell you, there were certainly forces working against the Phillies in that dark decade.

After she left the Phils and moved to Manhattan, Norpel became a latter-day Warhol acolyte through a friendship with Factory architect/poet Gerard Malanga. But she never lost her love of baseball.

Many years later and perhaps with a twinge of guilt, Norpel started Constitution Blues — part personal history, part novel — as a love letter to Phillies fans "to lift the curse off the team," she says. "Besides, Chase [Utley] and that gang never did anything to me. They weren't the team I'd cast the spell upon. When Charlie Manuel told fans to 'go to church and pray for us' in July 2006, I thought it was only fair to lift the curse."

Hexes aside, Norpel's debut novel — "It's definitely a roman a clef, a ficto-memoir with a nod to James Frey," she says — embodies the mixed emotions that drive our national pastime. It's even got a bit of insider intrigue: She begins dating an unnamed Phillies player (in what, she says, is a fact-based part of the book). "If Phillies fans or their people read this, they might guess who," Norpel says coyly. "I'm not saying either way."

In 2007, Norpel made it official: She walked around City Hall to curse-lift, and shortly thereafter finished her book.

Not only will Constitution Blues be the guest of honor at a book party at Old City's Patou April 16, but Norpel's contribution to the Phils' Paint the Phanatic public art project, Philantic, will be on display at the National Constitution Center this summer after unveiling at the Please Touch Museum this coming week. In a moment of karmic synergy, Norpel says, "It's amazing what the universe will do when you lift a curse."

Now if only she could do something about the Sixers.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Paint the Phanatic public art project launch, Mon., March 29, noon, free, Please Touch Museum, 4231 Avenue of the Republic, 215-963-0667, pleasetouchmuseum.org.

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