In Catholic heaven, according to The Simpsons, the dearly departed booze it up with mariachi bands. In Protestant heaven, they play croquet.
But urbanites in real life are bridging the ecumenical divide - with a croquet mallet in one hand and a beer can in the other.
Wearing sardonic T-shirts and lots of black, they've taken the twee game out of the country club and into city parks. On bumpy municipal lawns, using croquet sets purchased at Canadian Tire, they whack candy-coloured balls while nursing hangovers from the previous night's indie-rock show.
Hipster croquet has arrived.
Irreverent croquet players have been at it for weeks this spring in Vancouver, in Jericho Park and green spaces farther east.
(The argyle-free croquet season starts later in Toronto, at High Park and Trinity Bellwoods Park.)
Vancouver's East Side Croquet Club may sound official, but it's basically a group of friends in their 30s, most of them working in the tech industry.
Their croquet schedule is erratic, and judging by their website (Eastsidecroquet.com) they take a flexible approach to the game. Rule No. 1: "Each player must endeavour to elevate his/her blood alcohol level to above the legal driving limit for Canada."
For these melanin-deficient apartment dwellers, croquet is a laid-back alternative to the summer volleyball scene.
"We're not beach people," says club co-founder Bobbi Schell, taking a swig of red wine out of a plastic beverage container.
"And we're not athletic," her cohort, Julianna Horvat, pipes in.
Nevertheless, croquet is not just a front for brazen alcohol consumption, they insist.
"We really love the game," Ms. Horvat says. She and about half a dozen male and female opponents have been playing regularly for almost five years, which makes them early adopters of inner-city croquet.
In some boroughs, the game has become a quasi performance art. Last summer, a group staged an Edwardian-punk croquet match in the ruins of a Detroit factory. The same year in a Toronto park, another crew decked themselves out as characters from Alice in Wonderland and re-enacted the croquet scene, complete with the foul-tempered Queen of Hearts.
Not since its incarnation in the cult movie Heathers, released in 1989, has croquet been such a muse in the urban zeitgeist. In the black comedy, vicious teenaged girls in preppy sweaters swung their croquet mallets while plotting the downfall of less popular classmates.
Recently, croquet has shown up on the small screen. Last September, Gossip Girl's second season opened with libidinous teenagers playing the tony sport in the Hamptons.
Croquet's return coincided with the 1980s redux in fashion and financial markets (notably, the Black Monday stock-market plunge of 1987).
Nostalgia for computer-free pursuits has increased the game's appeal, says Lindsay Fernlund, who owns a vintage-clothing store in Toronto and took up croquet a couple of years ago with her fashion-conscious friends.
"It's kind of wholesome," she says.
They play the backyard version of the game, as opposed to the tournament variety. In backyard croquet, up to six players take turns hitting a ball on a course laid out with nine wickets and two stakes. The colour of a player's mallet matches that of his ball, and the order of play is determined by where that colour appears on the end-posts. The goal is to send a ball through all nine wickets, but it isn't as easy as it sounds.
Despite its genteel image, the game can be fiercely competitive - especially when a player hits an opponent's ball to divert it, a manoeuvre called a roquet.
Croquet has WASP connotations, Ms. Fernlund says, "but we're not that way." Her crowd sometimes dresses the part, though, wearing proper skirts and blouses for croquet games on summer weekends in Trinity Bellwoods Park. Ms. Fernlund calls it "Heather-ing it up."
One of the last British pastimes to be tapped for its Pimm's-infused kitsch, croquet appeals to literary types as well. Erik Bryan, who works in the New York publishing industry, says he likes the game because it's quirky and old-fashioned. And there's more strategy in croquet than in bocce and other lawn sports, he says. "It's almost like chess mixed with mini-golf."
Mr. Bryan and fellow croquet players meet in Brooklyn's bourgeois Park Slope neighbourhood. Their usual getup for a match includes stylish clothes and British newsboy caps - a look Mr. Bryan describes as "dandy foppish."
Playing croquet in Prospect Park is a great way to meet people, girls included, he says.
Even better, he adds, there's no running involved.
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A croquet chronicle
PRE-1850S An ancestor to modern croquet originates in either France (paille-maille) or Ireland (crooky).
1860s Croquet is all the rage in England and spreads through the Anglo world.
1900 Croquet is an event at the Summer Olympics in Paris.
1940s Croquet takes Tinseltown by storm - cinema moguls such as Sam Goldwyn play regularly.
1970s Extreme croquet, a rogue variant, emerges in the Nevada desert. It evolves into a game that may include blasting balls into the woods or knocking over opponents' beers.
1989 Croquet co-stars with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater in Heathers.
2006 Shortly after a sex scandal, former British deputy prime minister John Prescott is photographed playing croquet at his official residence on a work day. Sales of croquet equipment leap by 300 per cent at Wal-Mart's British subsidiary.
2008 Gossip Girl designer Abigail Lorick uses croquet as a jaunty accessory in the preview of her spring/summer 2009 collection during New York's Fashion Week.
Adriana Barton
