The Hose

The Greatest Play in Bar History



What makes the play so outstanding is that no one had to call it. It just unfolded naturally. But some background first:

A few years ago, during training, Evil and I started running the "crowding play". We'd probe bars for attractive women and on the off chance one reacted well to our silly comments, we both converge (read - pounce) on her and back her into a corner under the rain of silly one liners and inside jokes only he or I would understand. Clearly a flawed idea.

But this time, we were tight and on point. I attribute it to the disciple that the Marlboro Man brought to the table. His experience in the military was incredibly helpful in this situation as he leveraged his observational techniques to (1) pick up the play I decided to run and (2) support this play by both sealing off a tooly short guy who was making a pitch and doing so in a incredibly uncharsimatic way.

Evil contributed by playing it off real evil-like. He heard the tooly short guy went to Wharton and immediately drifted into his own preposterous b school applications and how he wrote with great emotion about teaching "an incredibly obese woman with tourettes syndrome" how to use a computer but in a increasingly condesending way.

With all the downfield blockers sealed off (see the red line), I proceeded to make my move. Who are you? What's your story? where do you work? why are you so hot? Do you know this guy or that guy? Oh you do? Can I smell your hair? I know him/her too? From around here? Nice...would you marry me? I dunno, have not spoken to him a in while. Hah, yes I did see Jon Stewart on Crossfire that was great...and I love you...I do sort of think its a cop out that Jon keeps calling himself a comedian yes.

But ultimately, I failed. I failed the way xtian famously fails. The tooly fellow, broke the tackles and proceeded to pull the "lets share a cab ride back uptown" move. Which in football is the equivalent of knocking the ball loose as I'm running with it towards the sidelines in the closing minutes.

The Marlboro Man (who would be my new sideman for life after watching his deft skills in action if he weren't leaving to Germany for ever) just looked up and said "man, i was pulling for you" and Evil, much less supportively, agreed "Dude, you dropped the ball. I had that guy talking crappy b school essays for as long as humanly possible"