Friday Night Lites

And that is why the Lebowski gets a 95.

The Walnut Hill Teacherati met at Vinny T's for our TAW cocktail hour last night. It was a small enclosed space, the food wasn't very good and there was a very loud band playing, among other things, Dylan covers of questionable quality. On the plus side, they were serving gallon-sized glasses of Sam Adams beer, of which I had two. I also got to introduce The Beck to the wide cast of characters that she has been hearing about, the absolute highlight of which was when Anne, a fellow math teacher, introduced Ellie by saying "She's English." Mass confusion over her country of origin and a bevy of win one for the motherland jokes ensued. In no particular order, the cast of characters for the Vinny T's portion of the evening included:

Stephanie, Julie, Matthew, Tom, Meredith, Jim, Kathy, Ben, Lindsey, Anne, Ellie, Jon, Antonio, Andy, Leslie, Rory, Jay, Diane, Teresa...

Notably no Corin or Anne. Boo-urns!

But that was the lame part of the evening, relatively speaking, so on to the... wait for it, wait for it... LANE part of the evening! We met Gina at Fairway Lanes, a craptastic candlepin bowling alley on Route 9 a whopping 50 yards from Vinny T's. And we candlepin bowled for an hour after everyone had gotten mildly buzzed at VT's. As you can imagine, our rowdy behavior was not condoned by the serious league bowlers there. We rebutted by pointing out that they were serious league candlepin bowlers.

Candlepin bowling, as you may or may not be aware, is an insanely ridiculous sport. If there is a correlation between skill and score, it escapes all empirical detection. I am lying, of course, but there is so much going against the player - the stupid ball is barely above bocce on the bowling ball spectrum, the pins are skinny as hell, plus it's usually played after drinking at Vinny T's - that scores come out randomly. Basically the only thing you can really control is not hitting the gutters, and maybe occasionally picking up one pin spares.*

*(At one point Ellie had only the 10 pin standing for a spare attempt. Another pin was lying in the gutter right next to it - you don't clear the felled pins in candlepin - so hitting the guuer on the right practically would have guaranteed knocking down the 10 pin. So we were encouraging Ellie just to roll it as hard as possible at the right gutter - and Andy chimes in, "No, don't hit the gutter, hit the pin!" Oh, hit the pin! I thought I was listening to Joe Morgan sports commentary for a second there!)

So anyways, massive amounts of fun - Antonio flamingo danced, Rory threw very softly and I basically tried to destroy everything in my path - people repeatedly said things like "the pins are not your students," etc. Jone, Kathy and Ellie turned out to be the best bowlers, but I am positive that any decent level of Clickian analysis would quickly reveal this to be bell curve action.

So a fun time was had by all - and perhaps my favorite moment was when Kathy Liu, our science dept. head (and one of my bosses) rolled a guttar ball and I calmly told her, "Don't worry, Kathy, they're not saying boo, they're saying Liuuuuuuuuuuu."

I felt like Peyton Manning.