6/10 - The Boneyard

Our first patio gig of the year! Well, our first outdoor patio gig. And to help us celebrate the occasion were some midges, which made Jake SO happy.

We had a tiny dancer at this one. She was a little cutie and she was quite mesmerized by Mudcat.

After a bit, one of the servers came out and with the bartender's help, rearranged the tables into a long line, because there was a party of 12 coming out to the patio. They get it all right and proper and moments later, 2 guys sit down with their beer at the far end of the tables.

They are obviously part of the party for which the rearranged tables were intended as they were watching for their friends. However, their friends decided to stand around a high top table that could fit four, if those 4 people were either really small or they were all jammed in together.

The boys at the long line-o-tables motion for them to come over and sit down. They don't. Oh, and I forgot to tell you that one of the boys was a big jock type guy and the other one was a scrawny geek type guy, which brings me to my next observation.

The bigger of the 2 boys is getting more anxious the longer he's segregated from his average size friends, so after a bit of what I'm sure he thought was an internal struggle....you know, the one that showed all over his face and was made even more outward with his body language, he left his small friend to fend for himself. But he was kind enough to leave the pitcher of beer with him.

So, now Scrawny Boy is getting to be even more of a Nervous Nelly, sitting at the head of the otherwise empty table with a pitcher of beer and his very own beer glass. When he realizes that all his "friends" are quite content to be standing all jammed together without him, he makes one of the most important decisions of his life. He holds his position as head of the empty table.

The look on his face told me that he probably spent a lot of his school years saving places for his friends in the cafeteria, while they ate at another table with the hope that they would at least join him for dessert and he was reliving those moments.

Finally Jock Boy comes back over to join Scrawny Boy, but only long enough to refill his glass from the pitcher that he left on the table with him. Scrawn Boy takes this as his cue to have an "in" and walks back to the group-o-guys with his large friend, leaving the pitcher of beer on the table to act as a beacon.

The good news is that the server chick and the bartender did not rearrange those tables in vain. That's where all the pitchers of beer ended up, so that the boys wouldn't have to take turns holding pitchers along with their glasses.

Curiously, the pitchers were always at the far end of the table from where all these boys were congregated....the very same spot where Scrawn Boy was lording over his invisible subjects.

One way or another, he was going to get his friends to that table.