So Dean calls me yesterday and wants to meet up. W…
So Dean calls me yesterday and wants to meet up. Where? At Hooters, of all places. I winced when he said it, but as I’ve been a real ass about going out with friends lately, I figured it would be a penance of sorts. They just wanted to see me squirm.
There was certainly a lot of squirming going on. By the time I walked in the front door and navigated my way through the irritating happy happy stick figures in tight white-and-orange outfits, Dean and Mindcrime had already nearly finished the first pitcher of a two-pitchers-of-beer/basket-of-chicken-wings deal. A sports channel was playing on the TV, 70’s hits providing the soundtrack. At one point the happy happy stick figures got together in a huddle to figure out what the Most Annoying Thing Ever would be, and they then came up with the idea to do a Conga Line. So they went around the restaurant and tried to pull customers off their chairs. Two of them tried to get me. I suppose I looked like a difficult case, especially since my companions were pulling that “Oh, you’re no fun” line I’ve been hearing ever since I was 11 and the concept of peer pressure entered my social consciousness. I glared at the first one and managed, with very little difficulty, to emit actual rays of curmudgeonliness and said “Leave. Now.” She left then, but the second one wasn’t so easily dismayed. She pulled with surprising strength for a stick figure, not responding to my plaintive cries to leave me the hell alone, so I had to jerk my arm away quickly, resulting in a comic domino effect on the Conga Line. The stick figures then switched to a “Musical Chairs” strategy to torment their captors and also, I believe, to show the rest of the customers how lucky they were not to be up there with the hapless victims.
Eventually the firlgriends arrived to stare about morosely and smile weakly as Mindcrime and Dean entertained each other with drunken antics that were, at least to them, progressively more brilliant. In the end I had to drink some wine in concession to their insobriety. Well, it worked when I was 11.
