Karen And The Baseball Of Doom

Hunt Continues For Elusive Phillies Karen; Movie Already In The Making

Philadelphia (AP) The better part of a month has now passed, and the mysterious Phillie Karen has yet to be identified. In an incident that went viral during a Phillies-Marlins game in Florida on the 5th of September, a father recovered a foul ball hit by Harrison Bader, and was about to give it to his son when a woman rushed in and demanded it as hers. Instead of making an argument about it, he handed it over to her, de-escalating the situation. The woman looked like a stereotypical Karen, ready to demand to speak to your manager, and proceeded to gloat and give the finger to others in the stands around her.

To their credit, both teams did some fast public relations. The Marlins gave the boy a goodie bag of team merchandise, and Bader himself met with the boy, giving him a signed baseball bat. Phillie Karen, as she has come to be known, left the stadium, became a meme, and the hunt for her true identity has been on ever since.

It's been a summer of poor behaviour by some adults in public settings. From the Coldplay concert that exposed an affair, largely thanks to the overreaction of the couple in question on a kiss cam, to a Polish executive stealing a hat from a child at a tennis game, a hat that a player had given to the boy. This incident has added to the record of adults behaving badly.

In the weeks since, while internet sleuths continue to try to figure out who she is, multiple memes have gone up with Phillie Karen, who even has the stereotypical Karen haircut, trying to grab things that don't belong to her from across pop culture and everyday life. There have been instances where women have been identified as the Karen in question, only to insist that they were nowhere near Florida, or have a rock solid alibi.

"It's exasperating sometimes," Karen Weston, a clinical psychologist in Philadelphia admitted this week. "I don't know where the Karen stereotype originated, and while I can admittedly laugh about the bad behaviour of certain women with that haircut, it's kind of bothersome to have my name attached to the stereotype. Please don't paint all Karens with the same brush."

For the record, Doctor Weston does not have a Karen haircut, and is known to this writer to be a soft spoken and unusually kind person who would never demand to speak to your manager.

This week, the hunt ramped up when a woman called in to Howard Stern's radio show, claiming to be Phillie Karen, while refusing to identify herself.  She rambled on and on in the shrill kind of tone that one would associate with a Karen. "It's a dog eat dog world out there, and this kid needs to grow up knowing you've gotta take what's yours, even if it means taking it from another kid. No regrets, believe me. I did the right thing."

Stern challenged her on that. "You know, that kid came out the winner in this whole thing, going home with a lot of swag and good memories because of both teams. You, on the other hand, if you are who you say you are, came across looking like a selfish ****ing idiot."

Karen sounded aggrieved. "I take what I want! Nobody tells me what to do! I want to speak to your manager!"

At this point, Stern cut her off.

Even though no positive identification has been made, Hollywood has already been ramping up pre-production on a film about the debacle. A Karen In The Outfield is the working title of a film to star Meg Ryan as Phillie Karen. Paramount has greenlit the film, to be directed by Rob Reiner, as a caper comedy. "Oh, it'll be fun," Reiner said. "I can't pass on a comedy, and really, with a story like this, the jokes really do write themselves."

Ryan has already started preparing for the role, meeting a group of Karens Anonymous, women who have had public meltdowns and are trying to better themselves and not be such a Karen ever again. She's asked them questions, heard their experiences, and their dismay at being filmed during their worst moments. "Everyone has regrets," Ryan told reporters. "Especially when your mistakes get played up for laughs. Which we'll be doing with this film. But that's beside the point."

Whoever Phillie Karen really is, she's been successful in evading being positively identified. But time will tell. A Karen of this magnitude in attitude will sooner or later blow her cover and have another Karen moment. Or someone she knows will just rat her out. Either way, it's just a matter of time. "Your average Karen either gets help or continues to be the way they are," psychologist Annabelle Cahill remarked. "But this one, she's Level Ten Karen. We're talking nuclear bomb level."

The last word comes from a statement made online from someone calling themselves Karenapocalypse3000. Writing in a Reddit forum, she said, "she is one of us. And we are her. And our time is near. The Karens will soon rise up and achieve our goal of universal domination."

In this reporter's view, that can't be good.