With Friends Like These...

We had only glanced away for a moment and that's when Martin shot out of the bathroom, out of the house, and into the night.....wearing nothing but his running shoes, some strategically placed duct tape, and a grin. (Or was that a grimace?) And what style!---he even had two duct tape "racing stripes" down each butt cheek! Charisse, Mary, and I grabbed our cameras and the chase was on.


I guess this was inevitable. After writing about poker, chess, and even a bit of tennis, it would be almost sacrilegious not to mention Cucumber. After all, I am something of a Cucumber apostle. (Or alternately, some prefer the somewhat less flattering epithet "Patient Zero" favored by those of my friends who view Cucumber akin to the plague.)

Ah, so what is Cucumber? Well, it's a rather "simple" card game that originated in Denmark. Instead of having a winner, there is one loser who must then perform some sort of activity that everyone has already agreed upon before the game began. (If you really want to know the rules, you can see them here. We use several of the variations.) Usually, the stakes start out quite small---maybe the loser has to wear a dunce hat made out of newspaper. Or if I'm among some international travelers, the loser might have to sing their country's national anthem. Or maybe they just buy the next round of french fries or beers. But as the night wears on, players become more emboldened (and perhaps more inebriated) and the stakes inevitably rise. It's the ultimate game for optimists: "Hey, there are five people here. What are the chances I'll lose?! Let's make the loser dance on the table in their underwear!" Optimism, and perhaps a good dose of schadenfreude too.

I learned Cucumber in a bar in Guayaquil, Ecuador from a crazy Danish guy who looked like a big mischievous leprechaun.....and the world has never been quite the same since. I've been treated to some interesting performances over the years. That very first night, an English woman ended up on the table doing her best impersonation of a gorilla taking a shower. In Takaka, New Zealand I watched an extremely skinny Japanese guy doing shirtless muscle poses on a table in a restaurant. That same evening, a six-foot-tall Austrian woman jumped into the ocean in her underwear at midnight. In a similar vein, my good friend Sean had to jump into a freezing cold glacier-melt river in Alaska in his underwear.




In Dharamsala, India (the hometown of the Dalai Lama, no less), a couple of Dutch and Israeli guys had to spend the day wearing garish make-up that had been gleefully applied by some fellow female travelers.


In one of the stranger stakes, in Pokhara, Nepal an Englishman had to go buy some vegetables, make a weird doll out of them, and then make it perform an entertaining dance for us.


That was an especially memorable evening because the next loser had to change into their swimsuit and then smear the table condiment of their choice all over their body. Despite all of us guy's best efforts to have one of the women lose, crazy Fabrizio from France took the fall. He was feeling his oats that day and chose to cover himself with a bottle of hot sauce. (Don't try this at home!) Yep, his body was soon in fiery agony as he hopped and writhed all over the place. Unfortunately, standing under a cold shower didn't help much, so we ended up grabbing some yogurt from the restaurant kitchen and poured it over his head where it could ooze down over his body too. Luckily, this helped dampen the fire and Fabrizio survived to someday advise his future grandchildren on the proper handling of condiments.


And yes, I've lost a few games along the way too. I've sung "I'm a Little Teapot" with a high-pitched voice in a bar, worn a pink thong on my head and matching pink boa as a "fairy princess", gotten to know duct tape too well, and even worn cow dung "shoes". But by far the worst loss I've had to endure was the "pirate wench" fiasco. This disaster occurred in a mano a mano Cucumber game with my good friend Phil. Originally, the loser was going to have to wear a lederhosen outfit (you know, one of those German alpine get-ups) with some handcuffs clipped to the back pocket, then go to a gay bar and perform a jig out on the dance floor. (Okay, so maybe that ain't so PC, but you've probably figured out by now that the game isn't exactly the most socially redeeming activity around.)

We played an extended game with the loser busting out at 40 points. It came down to a final dramatic hand as both of us teetered one point away from the abyss. A guy learns a lot about himself in moments like these, staring into the face of public humiliation. Pulse rates and blood pressures increase while etiquette and generosity decrease correspondingly. What fun, eh?! Then he crushed me with an unbelievably good hand. (Four kings out of eight cards, for those who need to know.) And that was all she wrote---time to pay the piper.

Fortunately or unfortunately---I haven't figured out yet---we couldn't get our hands on a lederhosen outfit that evening. "Luckily", Phil's girlfriend happened to have a pirate wench costume handy that my friends all agreed would be a nice substitute. (That's what it was really called, "Pirate Wench Costume".) So my four friends had a grand old time putting make-up on me and dressing me up. Of course there was the bright red lipstick and the requisite bra stuffed with rolled up socks. I wore a small white top with lacy ruffles and some kind of waist corset laced across my bare midriff. A satiny short red skirt and large hoop earrings rounded out the pirate wench look. Back then I had really long hair, so they put it in a ponytail coming off the side of my head. Besides the fact that I make quite an unattractive woman at even the best of times, I also hadn't shaved in a couple of days, so the overall effect was quite ghastly. Imagine some lonely sailor's grog-induced nightmare of a harlot on the Spanish Main and you'll have an idea of what I looked like.


All five of us drove together to a local dance bar with only a few double-takes by folks in other cars. They managed to park far away so that I had to walk several blocks on public display. At the entrance, the bouncer hesitated, but eventually let me in when I explained that I'd "lost a bet", as if that somehow made it okay. (Somewhere along the way we seem to have decided that I didn't have to dance at a gay bar. I can't remember why, but perhaps my friends decided that since I was wearing the more outlandish pirate wench costume I could forego the gay bar for a straight place. Or perhaps we were a bit skittish of any ill will---wholly justified, of course---that our little escapade might engender at a gay bar.)

The place wasn't very crowded, but that actually made me more uncomfortable since I stood out even more and couldn't disappear into a crowd. I got a beer and began sipping it to death, agonizing over my inevitable trip up to the dance floor. Unfortunately, there were only a few women out there dancing and they all fled when I finally got up the courage and went out to dance. The poor DJ tried to ignore me as best he could while I tried to ignore everybody else as best I could and we all (everybody there!) suffered together through some painfully awkward moments as I cavorted about on the dance floor by myself. But after a while, I managed to let go a little bit, to embrace my humiliation and fear, and even began to enjoy the dance, shaking my (scary) stuff for a few more songs of bouncy electronica.


Which brings us back to the present and Martin's legendary dash into the night and into the annals of Cucumber history. Yet another cautionary tale about excess optimism and excess alcohol. Yes, but he too embraced his humiliation and fear, even stylizing his loss with duct tape "racing stripes", claiming his fate as his own.

Which gives me the opportunity to finally segue into something that is relevant to my walkabout and the original intentions of this blog.



To be continued...


"Whoa, look at you, honey!"
---startled woman at the dance bar, regarding my pirate wench ensemble
(My response: "It's been a rough night.")

"If you're gonna fall, you might as well jump."
---Thai proverb

(By the way, Happy Holydaze, All!)