I could read GrumpyGOP stories for hours. I bet he could make the story of doing his taxes amusing.

8/25/2014 4:09:30 PM

^

8/25/2014 4:41:47 PM

Unfortunately I'm running into a bit of a block. Probably I have other stories but it helps if something dislodges them from memory. Anyone want to suggest a theme or something? Banjoman, you got any specific stories involving you I should mention?

8/25/2014 5:40:08 PM

Tell us a story from 2nd half of your senior year in high school, after getting accepted into college. Most people do something funny\stupid/memorable then.

8/25/2014 11:46:01 PM

Quote :

"Just before the debate tournament I'd had to bring my brother to the Greek festival in Greensboro so he could get extra credit in the history class he was predictably failing."

Lemme guess: European History? Man I loved Mrs. Thevaos.

8/26/2014 12:14:20 AM

Hell, I don't know. I think it was CP world history. My brother did not take advanced classes. For AP/IB European History I had a young guy. I can't remember his name, but he had a huge head.

Quote :

"Tell us a story from 2nd half of your senior year in high school, after getting accepted into college. Most people do something funny\stupid/memorable then."

Oh man. I don't think I did. In high school I was pretty tame.

But I suppose this was the time when I was faced with "the choice." I had applied to two schools: NCSU and UNC. I got into both.

From elementary school on, I had wanted to go to UNC. I wore UNC clothes. My mother was ecstatic. She'd wanted to go there but hadn't gotten in, I think, though I've never explicitly asked -- she ended up at Western. Even up to the time of applying for school, that was where I wanted to go. NCSU was a safety with the benefit that my closest friends were going there.

That's saying something. UNC was the destination for a LOT of my high school, which might as well be the UC Berkeley of high schools. The mix of IB kids and Greensboro Quakers was a potent mix for adolescent liberalism. When Douchey and I started the Teenage Republicans, our posters were torn down and vandalized by the supposedly peace-loving Quakers. It was a small cadre of people who wanted to go to NCSU.

Well, I got into NCSU first, followed by UNC a couple of weeks later. That's when my opinion on the matter started to shift. I don't have the letters anymore, but these were the tones they took:

NCSU:

"Hot damn, son! Looks like you've done pretty well for yourself. We'd be thrilled if you'd keep doing well for yourself at NC State. We like you. Frankly, we're impressed by you. In fact, you're gonna be in the Honors Program. Why don't you come down and visit? Thanks man. -NCSU"

UNC:

"Oh look, another one. Sigh. You weren't really obsequious enough in your application letters for our taste, but I suppose we can permit you to attend our institution until you inevitably fail out like the white trash hill person you are."

Well. Hmm. That was disconcerting. I didn't expect the dean at UNC to offer me a handjob or anything but that acceptance letter seemed to barely meet the standards for human politeness.

Oh well. My parents and I scheduled visits to both schools, though no doubt mom thought of NCSU mostly as an excuse to go eat at our favorite restaurant in Raleigh. The visits were on different days, and they pretty much made the decision for me.

(Let me point out here that my memory of exactly when we went is fuzzy. I think UNC was first but the weather doesn't make sense, and that was relevant.)

UNC is a beautiful campus. I will admit that. When we went, it was green and lush and in general the kind of place people think of when they imagine a nice, old college. The tour guide was not particularly rude. The food was good. There was only one problem:

The place was completely overrun with hare krishnas.

Some kind of festival was going on, and the result was that you could not take five steps without bumping into an orange, bald hippie. That school was teeming, infested with them.

This was not my idea of heaven. I'd put in my four years of being surrounded by people so far on the left they had to turn right to wave at Mao.

Then we went to NCSU. It was winter break, I think -- at any rate, the place was empty and lifeless, to the point of even the trees looking dead. The only sign of political activity I saw was an NRA bumper sticker.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of the NRA. They can be a little crazy. But if I have to choose between hare krishnas and the NRA, well, you can have this gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Of course, it wasn't just a bumper sticker that tipped me. The tone of the acceptance letters was important, as were my friends, as was my growing sense, as high school came to an end, that my life was not destined to follow the "good ideas" track. Even then, I knew NCSU was a poor career move for someone who wanted to go into the humanities. But I think it was the only move for me.

I ended up living in Chapel Hill for about three months when my ex and I moved in together. She was finishing school there. Worst three months of my life. That town has very, very little to recommend it in my opinion, even aside from all the hippie nonsense, and aside from relationship issues. Expensive, a huge pain in the ass to drive in, difficult to get to certain kinds of stores...fuck that place

[Edited on August 26, 2014 at 4:27 AM. Reason : ]

8/26/2014 4:23:59 AM

Fuck UNC and their letters.

It turns out that their admissions office somehow recorded my SAT scores incorrectly, and so when I was able to prove this to them and asked to reaplly to get a fair crack at the admissions, their response was to send me a hand written letter stating that, and I quote:

"We all have interesting stories and backgrounds, Mr. Cramer. However, this does not mean that everybody is entitled to join the rigorous institution that we have here at UNC-Chapel Hill" Or something like that. It was like they didn't even read the part where it said that my SAT score was off by 350 pts or something.

[Edited on August 26, 2014 at 4:13 PM. Reason : h]

8/26/2014 4:13:12 PM

I don't know if you guys are familiar with Castle McCulloch, the event venue kind of between Greensboro/High Point/Jamestown. It's a moderately big deal among locations of that kind, and probably some of you have been to a wedding there. Or, if you're lucky, to one of the parties, but we'll get to that. For now, let me say that the guy who owns the joint is my dad's cousin.

We'll call the guy Nam Uncle, because he has been described as "The only person in the world who had Vietnam War syndrome before he was sent to Vietnam." Nam Uncle is quite a character. He's a fanatical libertarian-bordering-on-anarchist who has a vast arsenal and absolutely no trust in government. He is meticulous about following the letter of the law, but legal loopholes are to this man what acorns are to squirrels, bones are to dogs, and bourbon is to me. His ever mannerism drips chauvinism and machismo. And yet, he runs what is still primarily a place for weddings. He is an expert at knowing what brides want. If you want to hear about the latest in floral arrangements or how the international banking conspiracy is conspiring to destroy civilization, he can -- and will -- talk your ear off for hours. (Note that his ability to talk, loudly and at length, is not limited to subjects with which he is familiar, and I've no doubt he could go on for at least 45 minutes about arthroscopic surgery or the smurfs)

So, yeah. Here we've got this guy, and the really nice events facility he runs. Sadly the economic crisis had an adverse affect on weddings. He was getting as many bookings as ever, but they were spending a lot less. This was a problem. So he, being possessed of crystal clear sanity on the sole subject of how to run a business, diversified. He started having parties.

At first it was Mardi Gras, styled as Castle Carnivale. I haven't been to Nawlins but I'm told this is the next best thing. Outlandish costumes and acts, everything dripping with booze and sex. A couple of thousand people attended and drank at the several bars (each with a different theme) and watched fire dancers, acrobats, and strippers.

The event was a big success, but Mardi Gras in NC tends to be a bit on the chilly side, so it hampered everybody's willingness to get nude. So he started having another one in the summer. Same exact theme, but now with a bigger and naked-er turnout.

At these first few parties I was a guest, my friends and I arriving with free admission tickets and promptly receiving free drink tickets. I think it was a good investment. I (or rather, my male friends) brought some of the most attractive women present, and when it came time to come flash the crowd for beads they were happy to oblige. Also, free tickets or no, we spent enough on liquor to finance Zambia's debt.

By the second year the party was pretty enormous, probably on the order of four thousand people, and it was pretty lewd, too. There was always a spanking booth and tradition demanded that virgins to the party, at least in my group, had to be whipped with a large, aubergine dildo. There was naked body painting. Two-story stripper poles. And then...

...and then, Grumpy's money ran out. I was shit broke and could go to this thing as a guest anymore, even with the free tickets. So Nam Uncle offered me a job helping out.

Working with Nam Uncle was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, he paid handsomely, and when he wasn't around the work was more rewarding than most I've had. On the other hand, sometimes he was around, and Nam Uncle's personality precludes him from saying anything positive and requires him to criticize. I'd set up a room according to his instructions. He would come in and tell me to change something. I would change it. He would come in and tell me to change it back. This would repeat until it was too late in the day for him to reasonably expect me to stay and change things, at which point I would be allowed to go home.

I had to live with the guy outside of work and I wasn't used to this. My coworkers, however, didn't, and were. And what a bunch of coworkers they were. One guy had been a bounty hunter but his license had been revoked. Another one talked exactly like Billy Bob Thorton in Slingblade. His best friend was the Mexican guy, whose legal status I never investigated too thoroughly. The Mexican guy barely spoke English. Slingblade spoke maybe two words of Spanish. I have no idea how the relationship worked, but those two were inseparable. A mother-daughter team had worked there since time immemorial.

Every day, we all went to lunch together, and this was the part of the day that was most edifying to me. Particularly when we would drive past a burned down or abandoned building and they would discuss, seriously and with professional eyes, the probable value of copper piping left in the building. One gets the impression that in my absence they would have set a time that night to come relieve it of that value.

The job would only last a couple of weeks -- mostly to set it up, then a night to actually work the party, then a couple of days of cleanup and take-down. They would be grueling, none so much as the time Nam Uncle decided to add a Halloween Party to the mix.

The man was paranoid that the party would be a flop. We all tried to convince him he was crazy, to talk him out of it, but he could not be prevented from handing out an unprecedented number of free tickets. "Man, it's a Halloween Party. Everybody of drinking age in central NC has been waiting for something like this for years. You sold out of Summer Mardi Gras and that's not even a thing!"

"No, no, first year parties are always weak." You can always reason with Nam Uncle. Farm animals, the Nazis, and brick walls, too.

Twenty minutes after the gates opened I was ordered up to the front gate to manage traffic flow. Half an hour after that the order came to deny entry to anybody who did not already have at least one ticket in the car. Ten minutes after that someone came up to help me, because traffic was backed up more than a mile in either direction.

I won't say who came up to help me. Certainly I would not say it was Nam Uncle himself. Whoever it was, though, they were pushing 70 and apparently had a gun.

It was a madhouse. One van with ten guys from Raleigh offered me $20 a head to get in. (I declined, because I am a loyal employee. Nam Uncle later said I was an idiot for not taking it.) One car tried to run me over to get into the place. People that actually lived in the neighborhood were furious.

The low point was when a band of people, denied entry, parked their vehicle in the woods and tried to walk in. The guy who was helping me told them not to go in. They flipped him off and kept walking. He pulled out a gun and fired two rounds.

I was in absolute shock. But I gotta hand it to the guy, he was cooler than the other side of the pillow. "Come off it, old man, we both know you're not gonna shoot me."

Think about what kind of balls that takes. The gun has been fired. Twice. And this dude didn't even turn around. He said it over his shoulder.

Well, he was right, the guy didn't want to shoot him. He did, however, tackle the guy, who was fifty years his junior. Eventually he left.

In the end, we had 7,000+ people at that party.

8/28/2014 9:41:12 AM

By the time I was 25 or so I had still never been to a titty bar. I didn't really see the draw. Tits, obviously, but as I understood it you couldn't touch them, so that mostly just seemed cruel. Also, strip clubs seemed unnecessarily expensive. But Anky McFall had discovered that he LOVED strip clubs during his time in the navy, so when he had leave and visited home, he insisted that we go. I can't remember the name of the place, but it was in Raleigh, the side opposite of Cary.

I think we went on a Saturday afternoon, so not the A+ team but not the dregs, either. Although, truth be told, at first I was not interested in the women. The layout and logistical demands of the building fascinated me. Anky told me to shut up about it, the girls were all about to come out onto the floor. I was instructed in clear terms: don't just go back with the first girl who approaches you, wait for one you really like.

So naturally I went back with the first girl who approached me. What can I say? I'm a man from the south. I was raised to be polite to women. What could be more rude than saying, "No, I'm sorry, you're not attractive enough to put your naked breasts in my face while gyrating on my penis"? It was an ambush. I had no excuse ready.

Thus my first lapdance came from a vacant-eyed brunette who might as well have been a robot. She told a couple of dirty jokes, obviously for the twentieth time that day ("What's the difference between cum and mayonnaise? Mayonnaise doesn't hit the back of your throat at thirty miles an hour"). She was not particularly attractive, partly from birth and partly from what was obviously some advanced drug use. She did her two dances and I was grateful to leave.

Crackwhore O'Houllihan hung around us for a while and gave some really terrible lines (also lies) about my "huge cock," before she finally realized wandered off.

The second parade of girls came out, and this time I did much better. A bubbly, bright-eyed blonde woman, clearly a bit older than me and not as fit as many of the others, but she was all-natural and devoid of the glitter and lotion combo that I was already beginning to despise. In contrast to the gaping void of personality and brains that Crackwhore had displayed, this lady was...well, she wasn't going to win a Nobel or anything, but she was comfortable with her level of intellect, and she was sincerely funny. These are important things to me. Also, she didn't try to convince me her name was "Destiny" or something. In fact, by the time we got to the back room, she'd told me that she was thirty and had two kids who were proud of her job. Honesty. Also important to me. Apparently even when talking about strippers.

So I sit down and she starts dancing. Ten seconds in she turns, looks at me, and says, "You know, this isn't a roller coaster."

Well, no, I thought, it isn't. Is this part of the game? We list things that this is not? This is not the space shuttle. This is not a Russian sauna. This is not un-awkward.

"You don't have to grip the armrests like that. You can touch me."

I looked down. Indeed, I had been gripping the upholstery so tightly that my knuckles were white, because I was terrified of forgetting myself, touching a dancer, and getting roughed up by large, bald, serious-looking man at the door. Tentatively, I removed my hands and placed them at her sides. She laughed and planted them squarely on her chest.

Alright, I said. Not too shabby. A fellow could get used to HELLO NOW WHAT IS THAT?

The lady had reached down, firmly grabbed my junk through my pants, and was stroking it vigorously.

OK, OK, OK, this is bad. My mind was racing. On the one hand, I had not come to this establishment to solicit prostitution. And isn't that what this is? I have no idea what the etiquette is here. Is it prostitution? I didn't ask for a handjob. I don't think I even implied interest. Maybe she's just doing this because we clicked? Don't be a fool, Grumpy. It's her job to make you think that you clicked. Sure, right, but wouldn't she have, I dunno, negotiated the price up front? I assume that the $40 or whatever covers the basic dances. Handjobs must be extra. Right? In which case this is prostitution and I should stop. Plus I only have $45. Fine, Mr. Moral Pants, but how are you politely going to tell the nice lady that she's just not worthy of rubbing your dick?

"Are you dehydrated?"

This seemed like a very random question. Is this code? Is she asking if I just nutted in my drawers? I found out later that apparently I was smacking my lips a lot in the course of my nervous internal dialogue.

The debate was never really resolved. Time ran out, and so did my money. I apologized, at least half honestly, that we would not be able to continue because of lack of funds. And on second thought, maybe more than half-honestly. That lady was a genius at reeling me in. If she'd slipped me her phone number on the way out, I would have called it, I don't care how many kids she had. I wanted to go back to the club the following weekend to see if she was still around, but fortunately nobody else did.

--

My subsequent strip club experiences were considerably less fraught, morally and emotionally. I don't think I ever paid for a private dance again, except once in Las Vegas, just to say I had. Due to a liquidity issue (I spent too much money and the ATM, wisely, would not let me draw out more), I had to spend half the night smoking cigarettes and watching my friends have fun. But this had its advantages. A lot of dancers came up and, on finding out that I really didn't have any money, would shrug, sit down, ask for a cigarette, and talk for a while. I talked in Spanish to a petite Cuban girl whose father was big in the anti-Castro movement in Miami. A Romanian girl laughed so hard she started snorting when I talked about my sole experience with her language (My priest, a Romanian guy, yelling "FUCK!" in response to a request from the bishop. "Fuck," in Romanian, means "I am doing that.")

I had my own little UN of gorgeous women there for a while, smoking my cigarettes, admittedly, but interested enough in the conversation that they were smoking them for free, with me and my broke-ass friends, rather than perusing the ample crowd of more financially secure men. Even if it was only for five minutes, it made me feel like a pimp, and isn't that what titty bars are for?

10/17/2014 5:03:17 AM

which jack shack was it? Thee doll house or Foxy Lady?

10/17/2014 9:41:51 PM

Quote :

" I can't remember the name of the place, but it was in Raleigh, the side opposite of Cary."

10/20/2014 5:46:48 AM

was trying to jog your memory that's all.

10/20/2014 7:53:46 AM

The Doll House sounds more familiar, so we'll run with that. As I recall it seemed to be kind of out there and isolated. Rumor had it that they had to be outside the city limits for mafia-related reasons, but while I don't doubt the presence of organized crime in Raleigh that always seemed unlikely to me.

10/20/2014 8:46:54 AM

oh i bet it was that place that burned down on the wake/joco line on highway 70. Crazyhorse?

10/20/2014 9:15:29 AM

Might be Capital Cabaret depending on how long ago this took place. Technically that place is in Morrisville.

10/20/2014 9:16:27 AM

Definitely not Capital Cabaret, it was on the opposite side of Raleigh from Morrisville. Don't think it was Crazyhorse, either. I'm increasingly confident it was Doll House.

I am pretty sure I once ate at Capital Cabaret, though, when one of my friends wanted to celebrate his birthday by eating the lunch buffet there.

10/20/2014 10:10:00 AM

NEED MOAR STORIES

11/23/2020 1:37:52 PM

Now that I live in DC, I overhear things of such profound stupidity that sometimes I think they cannot be actual snippets of conversation. No. They must be spells, whether to conjure the idiocy for which the city is famed or to ward it off, I do not know. How else to explain some of the following exchanges?

---

Maybe a year and a half ago, my wife and I got invited to a friend's house for a party. Now, I'm in my mid-30s, and my wife was born with the personality of a reclusive 45-year-old, so parties aren't generally a huge draw for us these days, least of all in the middle of the week. But this was a fellow Peace Corps person of about our age and inclination, so we figured it would be a pretty laid back affair.

Within minutes of our arrival, it was clear that everybody - including our friend - had gravely miscalculated. Her roommate - her much younger, more outgoing roommate - had been inviting far more people with far more success. To the horror of us three geezers, we were soon drowning in people so fresh out of school that they might have thought it was a graduation party.

It was mostly women of middling intelligence, but enter our hero, a stretched out human pimple with a man bun draped in an ill-fitting parody of professor's clothes. He threw himself at once into a frenzy of douchebaggery, all of us unaware that this dipshit behavior was but a mere aperitif to stimulate our appetite for the crowning imbecility to follow. In the span of five minutes, he loudly mansplained to several women how to fix a broken door handle, failed to fix the broken doorhandle himself, and proudly announced that he getting an MA in International Affairs as though everybody and their goddamn dog in this city doesn't already have one. But then it came, the inevitable DC question and the far-from-inevitable, amazing, beautiful response:

Girl: "So what do you do?"
Douchebag: "I work at [company.] It's like a think tank, but without the experts.

Let that sink in for a second.

It's like a think tank, but without the experts.

Those nine words are now my favorite sentence in the English language. What the fuck is a think tank without the experts? That basically describes everything. The Wolfweb is a think tank without the experts. So is your fantasy football league. So are a group of guys waiting in line for the truck stop glory hole. This moron, this beautiful, magnificent doofus, when asked what he did for a living, responded by effectively saying, "I communicate with random people in my general vicinity."

---

A few weeks later, pre-COVID still, at a bar downtown. Two guys in their late 50s or early 60s are talking, and I overhear:

"So I'd been working for Nancy long enough to know when she was pissed off, and she was definitely pissed off, because she couldn't get anything on the floor in the committee. She'd go and propose something to the chair, and he'd ignore it. Then Barbara would laugh at her, undo the top couple of buttons on her blouse, she'd go up and propose basically the same thing, and boom, it would get a hearing. Now I'm not saying Barbara's a fox or anything, but she could throw her girls around and get stuff done, and Nancy just couldn't."

It wasn't until about halfway through his story that I realized he was talking about Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer.

Just for reference, here is a picture of that notorious tart, Barbara Boxer:



Oh, yeah. She can submit a bill to my committee any day.

11/24/2020 2:32:59 PM

^like

11/24/2020 6:37:38 PM

hey, TWW has experts

11/24/2020 6:45:13 PM

Fuck yes the glorious return of GrumpyGOP stories! Finally some good news in 2020

[Edited on November 24, 2020 at 8:52 PM. Reason : and of course I'd cosponser her bill]

11/24/2020 8:51:58 PM

Bumping this mostly for the superior content contained within, but also with a hopeful eye towards the future

[Edited on March 6, 2021 at 11:10 AM. Reason : Grump have you ever hung out at Tortilla Coast?]

3/6/2021 11:08:23 AM

Not familiar with Tortilla Coast, sorry.

Alright, I'm now going to tell of the worst-planned wedding in the history of North Carolina. It is possible that the groom still peruses this site and will see it. If so, apologies to Anky McFall, but that shit was a clusterfuck.

Dear Anky, he of the broken ankles, returned from the Navy around the time I got back from Benin. He got a very good job in western NC, started working out, and quickly found himself to be among the most eligible bachelors in the area. Given the relative poverty and lack of education found in our fair state's mountainous recesses, perhaps this is not saying much. The important thing is that my buddy quickly found his bride, and asked me to be among his groomsmen.

Several months out from the wedding, Anky asked me who my favorite superhero was. Fighting back the urge to explain that I was not a six year old boy and therefore did not have a favorite superhero, I settled on Ironman on as the least absurd answer. In the absence of any context for the question, I was perplexed by an unsolicited package several weeks later containing a black T-shirt with a blue circle in the middle. But, hey, free T-shirt. It quickly became part of my "dirty jobs" outfit, to be worn when changing tires or trimming turds from around the dog's asshole or otherwise doing things that might sully a respectable Hawaiian shirt.

A little while later, I received cufflinks with the same blue circle and now an explanation, that these were all to be part of my suit. Oh. Shit. Better run that thing through the washer a few times. Then came instructions to buy a gray dress shirt at outrageous expense, because the white ones that came with the rental were so transparent you could see the superhero logos through them. This was followed by instructions to have the dress shirts modified to take cufflinks, in turn followed shortly thereafter by a note asking us to belay that order because you can't just magically transform a barrel cuff shirt into a link cuff shirt. Then came an order not to rent or bother bringing shoes.

At last, the weekend of the wedding arrived. On the fateful morning, Anky came to pick me up and to provide me with my shoes - personalized Chuck Taylor All Stars so prominently embroidered with wedding shit (the date on one, the names on the other) that under no circumstances would any of us ever be willing to wear them in public.

So up to this point, I possessed:

-A slightly dirty T-Shirt with the Ironman logo on it
-A dress shirt that I did not want but now owned
-Cufflinks that I could not wear with anything that day
-Shoes I would never wear on anything but that day

On our way to the wedding, Anky helpfully informed me that I was Best Man. Those of you who have ever been in a wedding or, indeed, watched any TV show or movie, ever, may be thinking, "Isn't that something you generally tell the Best Man weeks or even months in advance?" Yes, yes it is. Somehow it slipped Anky's mind. My shock was tempered when we arrived at the wedding venue and discovered that it was a brewery. For one brief shining moment, things were looking up. Then Anky cheerfully informed that the brewery would not be supplying the wedding's alcohol, which would top out in terms of quality and strength at Stella Artois.

Of more immediate concern, there wasn't actually anywhere for us to go. The actual venue was closed to us. There was no place to get ready. And so you had five guys in ill-fitting rental tuxes loitering outside of a frozen yogurt joint for several hours while the July sun grew ever stronger.

The groom had cleverly placed his passports, wedding rings, and wedding license into an old plastic bag. In cleaning up the garbage left by a snack run, this was predictably thrown into the trash. I consider the Best Man role to be largely supervisory and ordered one of the other idiots to rummage through and find it.

Eventually the photographer arrived and had us perform a series of athletic poses in the stifling heat, with helpful suggestions to crawl around on the dirty floor in our tuxedos. Her life was spared by one of several wedding coordinators telling us that the time had arrived.

About the ceremony, I recall nothing except that the officiant was inaudible.

We marched out in disarray, nobody having been able to attend the oddly-scheduled rehearsal or having any clue what to do. Myself and the Nerd (a fellow groomsman and star of the DNL dog-punching episode) ran directly to the reception hall to steal as many drink tickets as we could stuff into our pockets before being shuffled off to take more photos.

Finally, the point of all the superhero shit was revealed to us. All of it, the overpriced dress shirt included, was so that we could take one photo with all of us opening our shirts like superman to reveal the logo underneath. Of course, this only made sense for the groom, who was actually wearing a superman shirt, but our duty faithfully concluded we scurried back to the bar.

No sooner did we have our first Stella in hand than we were ordered outside with everyone else to take a group photo. The photographer had a drone that would fly over us and take one shot. We stood cheeck-to-jowl in the full force of the midday sun, waiting for the robot to take flight.

When it finally did, the photographer said, "Could you guys all move about ten feet to the right? There's a lightpost in the way."

Could we move? There were 150 of us, standing on platform. How in the name of God's holy ass was it easier to get all of us to move than to get the drone, which can fucking [/i]fly[/i], to hover its ass ten feet to the side?

I never got an answer. Admittedly in the annals of "bad things involving drones happening at weddings," this ranks pretty low, but still.

Eventually it came time for all the dances and blessings and other things that normal wedding attendees hate because it keeps them from going back to the bar or being fed. Except in our case, what kept us from being fed was the total absence of food.

Well, near-total absence. There was a Costco tray of broccoli and carrots and ranch dressing and shit, and there might have been some cold cuts on toothpicks. The important takeaway here is that it was now dinner time and there was no goddamn dinner.

By this point, conspicuously, Nerd and I are the only drunk ones. We're also the only ones trying to keep this operation on the rails. For example: When one of the venue attendants came up and asked us if we had batteries for the lightsabers.

The - the what now?

She showed us a table in the entryway, on which were a series of toy lightsabers ranging from "fancy collector's item" to "consolation prize at the state fair." It was the first any of us had heard about it. We eventually tracked down the groom as he went from table to table.

"Oh, yeah, the lightsabers. You guys now about this - you all hold them up to make an arch and then at the end of the night the bride and I run out under it."

Sure thing, Anky. Eventually the venue found us some batteries, and these we were placing into Star Wars toys at a Superhero-themed wedding when one of the other attendants came up.

"You guys can't light all these fireworks here. It's a fire hazard."

Come again?

The process repeated itself: we were shown a wholesale quantity of sparklers whose existence was completely novel to us. We tracked down Anky, who said, "Well, yeah, all the other people who don't have lightsabers will be standing around with sparklers."

We left to one side the question of how we were supposed to more-or-less simultaneously light and distribute 150 sparklers in time for them to make their exit. The venue had already informed us that the only way they could countenance any use of pyrotechnics was if they, the staff, lit them. I told Anky we'd do the best we could.

Five minutes later, Nerd and I were frantically unwrapping sparkler packages while our wives got pleasantly drunk in the dance hall. Suddenly the emcee said, "Ladies and gentlemen, let's say goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. McFall!" And my friend and his wife ran cheerfully out of the reception hall to the limo waiting below, under no lightsaber, no sparkler, nothing but the bewildered stares of his two best friends.

Five minutes after that someone discovered that Anky had left his wallet - including drivers license and credit/debit cards - at the venue. I called him up, probably interrupting his efforts to get amorous in the back of a limo on the way to the romantic Charlotte airport. That would explain his angry response of, "It's fine, I'll get them when we get back from Jamaica!"

The rest of us climbed into the one and only Uber in town and took it to Bojangles so that at last, finally, we would be fed.

The whole operation was such a trainwreck that I remain skeptical that they were actually, legally married by the end of it all. Later, I was given to understand that the chaos was owing to the five or six relatives who all wanted to be "Wedding Planner" in spite of no experience planning weddings, all of whom were indulged with little coordination between them.

My wife-to-be and I took many notes on this goat rodeo when planning our own wedding, which would have gone off without a hitch except that it rained so hard that Facebook asked all the guests to check in that they were still alive.

3/8/2021 2:05:48 PM

Quote :

"Not familiar with Tortilla Coast, sorry."

(mexican place adjacent to the capital where staffers and the like hang out. apparently good for overhearing things )

3/8/2021 2:19:08 PM

That closing line is real art.

3/8/2021 2:20:42 PM

^^Gotcha. No, the only bar I liked around there was Capitol Lounge, God rest its soul. Had some good memories there during the shutdown, though no good story material.

My main downtown DC bar is Harry's, which has become...awkward. It became Ground Zero for Proud Boys shenanigans last fall/winter, mostly because it's close to the Trump Hotel (and prime protest areas) while also being cheap. It got a lot of bad press as a result, some of it deserved: the owner was an idiot not to close during those protests rather than be associated with right-wing dipshits. Yeah, he made a few bucks off them around election time, but now they're gone and he's in a city that voted 95% or more for Biden and now thinks of Harry's as "that Proud Boys bar." Meanwhile, actual regulars know it as a place with a great, diverse after work crowd who all get along. Hopefully it's still that once I start going downtown regularly again.

3/8/2021 2:52:14 PM

!

3/8/2021 3:28:06 PM

Another encounter with idiocy, though this time not the sort unique to DC:

A couple years ago, the wife and I are returning from dinner on a fine summer evening and decide we're not ready to head home yet - we want to sit outside for a while. So we stopped at the only bar in our neighborhood with rooftop seating.

Normally, this wasn't a place we wanted anything to do with - cheap, shitty, overpriced bar food and a limited selection of crappy beer. This place existed mainly to cater to the nearby University of DC. I'm not a longtime resident, but it didn't take long for us to figure out that UDC is where locals sent their kids who were:

1) Not smart enough for George Washington, Georgetown, or American
2) Not smart or not black enough to go to Howard
3) Not deaf enough to go to Gallaudet

Meaning that every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evening, our street got a horde of white dudes with popped collars, scant brains, and a clinically normal level of hearing. They were occasionally followed by overdressed, preppy girls who weren't even trying to conceal their boredom as they killed time at cheap bars before they could go dancing or clubbing or whatever it is young people do after 11:00 PM.

Anyway, at this point it's about 9:00 PM. We're sipping drinks out of plastic cups on the roof, enjoying the night air if not the clientele. The table next to us empties and is promptly refilled by five of the aforementioned popped collars. Of these:

- Two are so drunk they immediately fall asleep on the table (it bears repeating here, it's only just now getting dark out)
- One is sober enough to remain upright but too drunk to speak or do anything other than rock back and forth
- Two are engaged in an animated conversation, which I will faithfully relate below:

Bro 1: "For real brah, last semester I was getting yuuuge."
Bro 2: "Ah sweet brah, like in a good way right?"
Bro 1: "No brah, not in a good way. I was eating chicken parm for, like, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yuge, brah. But then summer vaycay I started crushing it. For real, brah, I was crushing it over vaycay."
Bro 2: "I hear you, brah . . . was that a fucking meteor?"

At that moment a large meteor had, in fact, shot across the southern sky.

Me: "Yep, that was a meteor."
[Both conscious Bros snap over to look at me] Bro 1: "You're not shitting us, are you, brah?"
Me: "....No...."
Both Bros: "Sick, brah!"

Not having socialized with Bros much in college, this exchange was a revelation to my wife and I. To this day, neither of us will touch chicken parm, and if one of us starts to become concerned about gaining a little weight, the other is always there to tell them, "Don't worry. You can always crush it over vaycay."

This story is also my closest thing to a claim to fame in DC, where nobody gives a shit that I was on Jeopardy! but where several people are impressed that the above was a finalist for 2018's best "Overheard" on DCist.

3/8/2021 4:52:51 PM

Finalist out of how many?

3/8/2021 6:29:09 PM

Reviving this out of boredom.

December of last year, the wife and I took a trip to NYC. It's become a holiday season tradition: see a show or two, eat some good food, and get drinks at Bemelman's Bar, underneath the Carlyle hotel. Bemelman's is not at all my usual type of bar, but just once a year, we go and act like fancy people.

Normally we just walk right in but we got there a little too late on a Friday afternoon right before Christmas, and there was a line to get to the bar. We had nothing better to do, so we waited. And waited. And waited. Until finally, after 45 minutes, we were at the front of the (now even longer) line.

At this point a well-dressed young man and a similarly put-together older woman walked past the line to the door where my wife and I were waiting. The man started opening the door, and the woman said, "Wait, are we skipping all these people in line?"

"No," said the man, "They're in line for the bar, we're going to the tea room."

"The bar?" She looked me dead in the face, then my wife, then back to me. "You people need a drink so bad you'd wait in line?"

I stared, slack-jawed, not comprehending. "Uh...yeah."

She laughed, shook her head, and walked in.

I looked at my wife, and we simultaneously began to ask each other, "Was that -?"

The two young ladies behind us, already on their phones and tweeting/snapchatting/whatever the incident, cut us off. "Yeah, that was Martha Stewart."

So there you have it: Martha Stewart thinks I'm an alcoholic.

8/24/2023 4:37:17 PM

I didn't know they let ex-cons in this place

8/24/2023 4:50:35 PM

Was she being snarky or snotty?

8/26/2023 12:05:42 AM

I think more snarky. Or just honestly confused. I don't think Martha Stewart has spent a lot of time in crowded bars, and I think it's been a long time since she had to wait in line for anything.

8/26/2023 8:24:42 AM

and then everyone clapped

8/26/2023 1:50:38 PM