Waiting for the cartwheel...

Back to work today.. fun stuff. Always tough getting up that first morning back to work after a vacation. I was off 11 days.. 10 of which I spent in sunny CA with my girlfriend. It was a wonderful trip.. a bit warm for my taste towards the end, but at least it never got Arizona hot. :P

One of the nights I was there, L got asked to sub for her friends pool league team that had a match that night. She doesn't really play, but they were desperate to fill the spot so they didn't have to forfeit so she agreed and away we went to this old dive bar for some drinks and some pool. We got there and I met all the people and they were waiting for the other team to all arive so they could get started. We grabbed a few drinks and were just hanging out and talking and I was doing what I always do in a bar.. people watch. I was not dissapointed.

At the far end of the bar where the two pools tables were was a group of mostly women playing pool and enjoying the music. Obviously drinking pretty heavily and doing their best to prove that "white people don't have rythym" stereotype to be true. There was a chick with long dirty blonde hair that was really into it. She had a pretty nice ass and was wearing very tight jeans and dancing like she was auditioning for a Whitesnake video. All that was missing was a car hood for her to slither across. She started to make a spin move .. and what I saw next still gives me the chills now when I think about it.

You know those women you see from the back.. or from a distance and you think she's pretty hot and then you get a look at her face and you are visibly shaken? This was one of those times. When she turned there was a collective gasp from the bar as we realized that it was not a woman at all.. but an alien life form that had tried to fit in with humans best it could by matching its body type to an in shape 30 year old woman. The head however it failed to research completely and so it ended up with what looked a lot like a cross between a sharpei and a pterodactyl. It really was quite traumatizing. Imagine thinking there is this kinda hot chick and then she turns and you are gazing into the face of terror:



It took a few beers to get past that. In the meantime I was enjoying the antics of the super drunk 45 year old woman in the peach dress. She had obviously been there a while and it was apparently DTYAS day. For those of you not familiar, that is "Drink Til You Are Stupid" day. Its not a set day, but rather shows up at different times for each individual person. It was definitely her DTYAS day however and she was feeling it. She was dancing with anyone that was willing including the ShortsDressShirtCowboy who will henceforth be known as SDSC for ease of typing. This guy was in grey shorts, a striped button down shirt and a rockin cowboy hat. He was also quite drunk. Drunk enough to forget that he dances like a semi-retarded monkey that just spent 5 minutes being spun around in a dryer and is trying to regain his equilibrium. It might very well have been DTYAS day for him too.

Anyway.. these two had some moves. They cleared some people out of the way so they could kind of dance in the isle and it was stunning. Not in the "damn these two can dance" kind of way, but more like the "I wish I had a video camera so I could put this on YouTube for the world to enjoy" kind of stunning. I couldn't look away.. couldn't stop staring as they made up there own genre of dancing. It was like some strange interpretation of the electric slide line dance mixed with a dash of the chicken dance everyone does at weddings, a pinch of the macarena and just a tiny bit of some stripper pole dancing for the peach dress woman. SDSC like to toss in some of that brim grabbing on his cowboy hat and occasionally doing the "take my hat off, move it around with my hand some and then toss it back on my head" move. It was just .. well... stunning.

Peach dress chick after tiring of dancing with SDSC starts going up to each person sitting at the actual bar.. trying to find someone that will talk to her.. and probably by her another drink. She notices this guy picking songs at the jukebox there and decides to go talk to him. Well it started like she was going to talk to him, but very quickly she went from talking and doing that drunk woman super laugh thing to sliding in between him and the jukebox and showing that she had probably at one point paid her way through school by stripping. She should have gotten a free drink from the bar owner for polishing the shit out of that jukebox with her ass. The guy at the jukebox was trying to figure out if she was for real or what.

We are all just kind of watching this display and when she tires of polishing the jukebox she starts heading back towards the bar area. At this point I lean over to Lisa and jokingly say "I am just waiting for her to launch into a cartwheel or something!" Lisa chuckles at that idea and the we just happened to look back to see her waving someone out of her way and I shit you not.. she takes a couple of running, stumbling steps and knocks out a cartwheel like she was Mary Lou Retton. She nailed it too. I was just in shock. I was pretty sure I had basically whispered that to L, but apparently I had yelled it through a bullhorn. Either that or in her drunken state her ears had improved to bat-like hearing to compensate for the dulling of all her other senses. I don't know what on earth possesed her to launch a cartwheel not 5 seconds after I joking whispered that, but damn if I didn't feel like Nostradamus all of a sudden. Wanting to test my new found powers, I immediately said "I am just waiting for Ed McMahon to show up and hand me a really big check for 10 million". Alas, it seems my powers were limited and temporary.

After that.. I am expecting pretty much anything, but peach dress chick left early and I was trying to avoid looking at sharpei/pteradactyl woman. It seemed like things were settling down. The pool matches started. People were playing music on the jukebox and the booze was flowing. As the night progressed, someone put on 4 Brittney Spears songs in a row. This got one of sharpei chick's friends feeling like she needed to get her freak on. She was feeling it apparently and was in the groove.. or something. She is going to town with herself in one of the big mirrors on the side of the bar where the pool tables are. Again.. it was impossible to look away.

Most of us are watching this display. She was just lost in the moment with herself. It was at this time however that SDSC noticed she had "it".. and was dancing alone. He decided to compliment her with his own stellar dance moves. It wasn't long before the two were putting on a display of dancing that was just mezmerizing. SDSC was doing all of this with a lit cigarrette hanging from his mouth, I think because it completed the look he was going for. However, when you are doing those complicated dance moves, you have to make sure you are aware of the fact that you have a object that is on fire in your mouth. He quickly forgot and it tumbles to the floor.

I would have been impressed if he had used a sweet dance move to stomp it out and just keep in the groove. What happened though was far more amazing. Realizing he had dropped his smoke, he spun the drunk chick away from him, did a spin himself into a dip move in which he managed to pick up his smoke and in one grand sweeping gesture, return it to his mouth and then the hand continued up into the super cool sweep across the brim of my hat like it needs to be straightened move. I wanted to give him a standing ovation. The improvisation, the finesse, the degree of difficulty... amazing! If I had pen and paper in hand, I would have given him a 9.8. He would have gotten a perfect score had he spun the drunk chick just a bit harder and sent her right into the wall for my amusement.

All in all, it was a fun night. You just never know what you are going to end up with when you mix people with enough alchohol. It's usually pretty entertaining though!