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| A night of pleasant strangeness "Life is a mix of stuff and this night was a pretty strange mix but it sure was fun." |
Friday, 13th October 2006 |
  We had so much fun going to the Three Dog Night Concert at Billy Bob's that the group decided to do it again. This time to see Heart. I don't own any Heart albums but I do know a lot of their music. Mike and Delane pick us up in their Van. It is very nice but the doors are too complicated for me. The doors are electric and when you pull on the handle the door opens or closes automatically. I am a "dumb to the bone grunt" so I yank on the handle like I am trying to open the rear hatch of an armored personnel carrier. Mike sees me trying to yank the doors off of his van so in a panic tries to open them from the drivers seat, this only results in closing the door which makes me pull even harder. We go back and forth awhile until I am pulling so hard that I have the passenger side of the van almost an inch off the ground. Mike has a decision to make. He can drive off leaving Cheryl and I behind or he can tell me to take my hand off his car and open it from inside. He tells me to let go of the handle and lets us in. I'm pretty sure that he will later regret his decision not to leave me behind. Maybe not, since Cheryl is really nice and you have to take me to get her. I'm really glad of this since if I wasn't married to Cheryl no one would take me anywhere. Everyone loves Cheryl, no matter where I've lived, gone to school or worked I have always been referred to as, "Cheryl's husband." I have been working for Novell for almost 15 years the people there only see her at Christmas parties and even they refer to me as "Cheryl's husband". I don't know why? I guess I am just not memorable. I'll get introduced to someone at work who should remember me because they have worked with me, or maybe even reported to me, and they won't remember me until someone else says, "You know Tom, he's married to Cheryl." Mike has already picked up the other couple coming with us, Jonathan and Dawn. We are all going to dinner at the Lonesome Dove, a very nice restaurant in the Fort Worth Stockyard area. I have never been there but I have heard great things about it. We have a 8:30 reservation but the Fort Worth traffic makes it look like we will miss it, which means that we will be eating corn dogs and wings at Billy Bob's instead of a nice meal at the Lonesome Dove. Mike pulls off some really fancy moves with the van and we pull up just two minutes late so we get seated. They take us but I think they may have given away our original table. We are tucked into a dark corner of the restaurant. If it was a table for two it might have been kind of romantic but since we were a party of six, I would have liked a little more light. I think I could see the menu just about as well with my eyes blindfolded. I asked for a menu in braille but before they could bring it Dawn stole the candles off of every table that was empty and a few from tables where the person had left to use the restroom. I was afraid the smoke alarm was going to go off. The waiter came over and we asked for even more candles. He offered to illuminate the menu using his penlight but it is a bit slow to read the menu one word at a time so after adding five more candles bringing our total up to an even dozen we were just able to make out the menu. I am cheap, if you don't know that yet welcome to my web site and please feel free to look around. I thought the prices were part numbers or maybe even phone numbers. If I am going to spend that kind of money I have a decision to make. Am I going to order something that I know I will like for way too much money or am I going to order something that will be funny when I write about it. Last time we were out I ordered Chicken Fried Lobster so you can guess the direction that I went this time. I am not going to tell you what I ordered, I'll tell you what we all ordered and then make you figure out which order was mine. I will give a $20 starbucks gift certificate to the first person that emails me with the meal that I ordered. I want to be fair so take into consideration that I am, as my last article pointed out, a "Happy Husband" so I do have a tendency to order my meal based on what Cheryl might like. She has the right of first refusal on any meal I order. She gets to try them both, then take the one that she likes the most. In this case though I ordered what I thought would be the funniest At the table for the appetizer we had:
If you want to guess what I ordered, there are some rules: You can only submit one guess per email address and your email address must be on my blog list or will be added to my blog list so you have to decide if you feel lucky and can be bought for $20. To make it fair anyone attending the dinner is not eligible, but I appreciate you guys so much for letting me come along that I will buy you a muffin and a Grande coffee which last time I looked was almost $20. We finished dinner just in time to make the concert. I tried one more time to rip the door off Mike's van until he came around and let us in while giving me a look that could only be translated into "Are you really this much of a moron?" I have to answer, Yes and if he had read any of my stories he would know that. We walked into Billy Bob's. I really didn't know what to expect since while I like their music I'm not really a "Heart" fan. I still don't know, but based on the people attending you can break the group in half. Half of us were older, overweight couples trying to recapture our lost youth and the other half were very attractive lesbians. Not that there is anything wrong with that but it was a little surprising. I just didn't expect Billy Bob's in Fort Worth, Texas or Heart to to have a large gay following. These women were not your laid back let the music flow over me and remember the summer of love lesbians. They were in your face radical lesbians. They even scared the bouncer. They were standing and rocking out to the band when the bouncer told them to please sit down, one women moved so far into his face that she was standing behind him. I thought I was going to have to back him up but after taking another look at her I decided he was on his own. The guy at the table next to me stopped the bouncer about half an hour later and asked him to tell the girls to sit down again and the bouncer was so afraid to do it that he told everyone else to stand up. Heart played a very nice set of songs that covered everything from their early music off the Dreamboat Annie album to some of their solo  albums and
they also covered other 70's bands. It was over too quickly for me so
rather than
call it a night we decided to stick around. This is Billy
Bob's
so after the headliner plays you have a couple of choices; you can
do a little bull riding or get out on the dance floor. I'm sure none of you think, for even a second, that I was going to climb on the back of a live bull. The only problem is that I'm only a little less likely to get out on the dance floor. I was stationed in Texas for about a year while Cheryl was going to college in Georgia which means that I ended up in a couple of honky tonks while we were apart. After consuming vast quantities of alcohol I would end up dancing. So let me set the scene. I am from New York but I am also an Army Platoon Sergeant who has been stationed in Kentucky, Georgia, and Texas over the last nine years. Heck even when I was stationed in Germany I was based in Bavaria, which is southern Germany so I can do a pretty good Southern accent. If you are yelling at an army private you just naturally fall into a southern accent, I don't know why but everyone does. "Son, I've seen stupid but you, Boy! You just plain scare me." The other place you naturally fall into a southern accent is a Texas honky tonk. The only real difference between a southern and a Texas accent is the word "Darling" I'm not sure I would have used the world "Darling" on a live fire range anyway but in Texas on the dance floor you can't ask a women to dance without saying "Darling" at least once. Twenty years ago I learned how to Texas Two-Step by getting just enough liquid courage in me to ask a girl standing at the bar wearing a "Save A Horse Ride A Cowboy" T-shirt to dance. I asked, "Darling, How would you like to dance with this old soldier?" She didn't say no but what she did say hurt almost as much, "Can you dance?" It proved she was a good judge of character since I couldn't dance, still can't. The problem is if you go out with five grunts and you don't want to spend all night standing at the bar talking about how many minutes of angle a bullet will drop at 100 meters you have to dance. Women don't go to bars to sit around and talk. They come to dance so if you want to talk to them you have to dance with them. I think about walking away but I am way too committed by now and I've got just enough whiskey in me to answer truthfully, " Nope Darling, I can't. But I bet my buddies over there that you could teach me. If you're not up to the job I'll just have to skulk on back there and tell them I struck out. Now if you do dance with me I'll split the $20 bucks with you." I have used this line four times in my life three times with pretty young ladies in Texas and once with my pretty young wife. It worked three times. The Texas two-step is danced with two quick steps followed by two slow steps. I know this, because as these young ladies struggled to teach me how to do it while they would explain it to me over and over again. The only thing I am worse at than the Texas two-step is normal dancing. You know fast stand apart and move your body to the beat dancing. If I get on the dance floor at all, it has to be for what a girl once called belt buckle polishing music. The kind where you are holding the girl close to you with your arms wrapped around her instead of flailing around like some one drop an ice cube down your back. Cheryl knows this. We dance at every wedding, since it would be rude not to, but that it is about it. I try and dance tonight but it was a fast song so I don't make it to the end. Well. I do make it to the end, I make it to the end of the bar. I order a whiskey and start telling Cheryl how much a bullet drops at a hundred meters. We wander over to the dance floor to watch Mike & Delane and Jonathan & Dawn dance. The guys give up after a couple dances and then we watch Delane and Dawn dance. This doesn't strike me as too strange until I look around the bar. The ratio of girls to guys is about five to one. We are in a Texas bar after midnight and there are five girls for every guy in the place. I look around and figure out that no "Single" guy in this place has a chance at going home with a woman tonight. A "Single" girl in this place has a really good chance of going home with a women. Not that there is anything wrong with that but it was a little surprising. The music stayed fast so no more dancing since by that time I had embarrassed Cheryl too much to get her back on the dance floor. I did ask Delane to dance and since her name is so close to "Darling" it was just like old times. We didn't Texas two-step it was just a normal slow dance with me bumping her into the other couples and stepping on her feet. I had a great time but the number of women that will dance with me has been reduced by two with that single dance. Delane because she lived through it and Dawn because she watched it. I walk over to the bar, order another whiskey, turn to Cheryl and say, "Darling you know I always like to set my sights to shoot 8 centinmeters high at 100 meters. This way I'm zeroed in at 250." She says, "I know honey but I can't dance either so don't worry about it." |
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