Putting the Sub in Urban

A typical weekend night for my husband and I looks a lot like a typical week night for my husband and I.  After the kids are in bed, we stay up as late as our eyelids will allow, usually doing a combination of reading/watching ridiculous television.  My eyelids usually slam shut around the respectable hour of 9PM -- the time most adults are nearing the end of a meal or just gearing up for the evening's activities.

I know.  I am THAT fun.

This weekend, though, was different.  This weekend, Saturday night called for us to get our game faces on.  And our "uniforms."  For this past Saturday night, we competed in the inaugural Suburban Beer Pong Championship.

The event was hosted by a couple we are friends with -- I actually went to high school with both of them and now we have children around the same age.  They set up a huge white tent in their back yard, laid out 8 pong tables, amassed huge quantities of red solo cups, and commandeered three kegs.  All so that 32 couples could get their Pong on.

The ringmaster of this event is Party Planner Extraordinaire, working in beautiful harmony his wife.  Some people might call them the Martha Stewart/Ty Pennington/Mindy Weiss trifecta of Southern Maine.  And those people would be right.  (Except that I'm pretty sure neither Husband nor Wife would look kindly upon insider trading, unless it's of the household chore variety.)

Together, Husband and Wife ran a seamless event, complete with a winner's circle, prizes, bracketology, a soundtrack, and the most delicious ice cream cake that came shrink-wrapped in heavy duty plastic.  So really, they've got better ideas than Martha. 

Their only real mistake was inviting me.  Because there are two very important things that should disqualify me from most parties, but especially one centered around beer pong.

Thing One:  I have never played beer pong.

Thing Two:  I have never finished a beer.

So there was me and then there were about 60 other people more well-suited for the evening's events.  Here's who some of them were.

I'm With Stupid:  This would be my husband.  He was there with me (a/k/a "Stupid").  Our team name (yes, these were required) was Tropic Thunder.  Our uniform (also required) consited of Wal-Mart's finest Hawaiian shirts.  I topped my look off with big flower earrings and sandals.  My husband wore Corona flip-flops and khaki shorts. 

We looked like we should have been serving pina coladas to the mid-life crisis crowd.  And between the two of us, the most we can boast of in the way of hand-eye coordination is being quick with a computer mouse.  Needless to say, we lost in shameless fashion in the first round.

The Good Doctor:  This guy came to the party dressed as a douchebag from Jersey.  His costume was so good that it didn't even look like a costume.  He was transcendent.  Big-muscled arms (c/o P90X, rumor has it), stenciled-in tattoos (one, of course, the barbed-wire wrap-around arm thing, the other an anchor), low-slung baggy jeans that showed just enough of his boxer briefs, and a sleeveless white undershirt (what some less PC than I might call a "wife beater").  He grew out his facial hair so that he could shave the perfect chin curtain, and he found the most perfect pair of sunglasses to wear perched on his closely-shaved head.  The only thing missing from his ensemble was a bicycle suitable for an 8-year-old but with chromed everything.  To look at him was to lose consonants from your alphabet, degrees from your education, and privileges from your child visitation schedule.

In his real life, the man is a highly-respected orthopedic surgeon.  Which means this girl will be taking extra-special care of her musculoskeletal system.  After Saturday night, I'm not sure I could let him approach me with even a stethoscope.

The High School Sweethearts: This is another couple I went to high school with, and I think they began dating sometime around my first middle school dance.  They're the kind of pair to dominate a list of superlatives.  Between them they'd clean up on all the categories for smarts, athletics, and personality.  Probably smile, too.  Definitely out of contention for the Most Likely To Cross the Country in a VW Van (literally a category in my senior yearbook).

They showed up on Saturday with gluten-free beer and without a costume.  What they lacked in wheat and whimsy, they made up for in competitiveness.  This duo was in it to win it.  Normally friendly and mild-mannered, they were a screaming, swearing, booty-shaking, high-fiving dynamic duo the likes of which Maine has not seen since Rick Charette got together with The Bubble Gum Band. 

Gauntlet-throwing was their specialty, and their march to victory was only derailed when Mr. Sweetheart got a little too exuberant in his booty-shaking and knocked over a full solo cup, giving their competition a go-ahead knock-out. 

For the rest of the night, every time I saw him, he just shook his head and yelled something about not appreciating the size of his own behind.  Then he punched an empty keg and walked into the woods for some alone time.

The Spartans:  This couple was the opposite of The High School Sweethearts in that they came in full costume, WITH a choreographed dance to boot.  They played the Spartans cheerleaders from the famous SNL skits featuring Will Ferrell.  There was a lot of scissor-kicking and "who-hoos!"  They kind of made the event almost like the Olympics.  If the Olympics involved more beer and more parents of young children.

The Newlyweds:  These were youngsters that should not, in my mind, have been allowed to participate.  They were recently married and did not have any children.  They kept telling everyone about how they DO HAVE DOGS!  Which just made everyone want to vomit down their back and ask them questions about butterflies and trains all night long without ever changing the pitch or tone of the question.  They were toned and fit in the way that young people without children are.  They were also tan.  And happy in the bouncy sort of way.  They were also affectionate in the "I still think it's cute the sofa is molded to his reclined position" sort of way.

Naturally, most of the rest of the crowd didn't like them much.

Naturally, they made it to the finals. 

The Who Invited Them?:  This was the couple to end all couples.  A couple who stood out in a sea of competitors who in a mere 6 hours would be reminding short, intemperate small people to use their listening ears and to stop using the landline phone as a baseball bat. 

The male half of this couple was actually tame.  At least in relative terms.  I don't even have anything remarkable to say about him other than who he brought as his date.

Oh, his date.  Because of course this duo wasn't even married.  In fact, the grapevine reported that they'd broken up just prior to the party.  Which only further cemented their status as middle-schoolers at a party for political science grad students.

The Date had bleach blond hair with kinks in it.  Kinks like the ones you used to aim for when you braided your wet hair at night and then unveiled in the morning for those curls that didn't look quite natural but also didn't look quite chemically induced.  Those kinks were held back by a bright white cotton headband.

Her body was only barely held back by a leotard/sports bra/legging composition circa Jane Fonda's jazzercise years.  Breasts and both halves of her derriere kept on popping out from her side of the pong table for all the watching world to see.  Mostly because she kept on pulling down or pulling up her attire to expose those body parts.

Yes, this was a gal who didn't just coat-check her acid-washed denim jacket at the door.  She checked all semblance of modesty and whatever shred of dignity she walks around with in her daily life.  Which I'm guessing probably isn't much anyway.  She looked so comfortable molesting her side of the table that I'm left only to conclude that she spends her working hours molesting a pole.  Not of the fireman variety.

When her tongue wasn't suggestively wagging and her booty wasn't rhythmically gyrating, she was heckling, swearing and flashing.  Slowly but surely, the tides turned against her and her antics.  Probably because her act was so torrid that the parents in the audience (which, again, constituted 99% of the crowd) felt like they were disgracing their children just by being in the presence of such impropriety.  I think I can speak for all of us when I report that I went home and upped the parental controls on all of our electronics, for fear that my participation in an event with the likes of this gal made the entire ecosystem of my home vulnerable to attacks from smut.

Girl fights were in the offing.  Prominent PTA figures were drafting resolutions to never let bleach blonds within 20 yards of school grounds.  Janet Jackson officially passed the Nipplegate mantle.

Naturally, this duo beat The Newlyweds to hoist the championship trophy over their empty heads.

Naturally, the crowd reacted by quietly backpeddling towards their minivans and riding home to the sweet sounds of Disney Princess Classics, Volume I, shaking their heads and vowing never, EVER to let their daughter demean herself or her body so as to gain a competitive advantage.

Unless it helps the family score tickets to (a) Justin Bieber's next concert; (b) The Polar Express Journey to the North Pole in North Conway; or (c) Miley Cyrus' wedding.