Celebrating 29 in style and behind enemy lines

I love costume parties. I seriously do. Any excuse to dress up unusual is fine enough for me. If I could wear a space suit to work every Friday, I would. Anyway, my birthday fell on a Saturday this year, and frankly I think that is God’s way of telling me I needed a costume party. I set up a bar golf pub crawl thing and I was surprised to find out how many people have not heard of the concept. Basically you find 9 bars (preferably near each other to minimize travel time) and assign a special “designated” drink at each bar. You try to pick out something unique to that bar. For example, a tiny West Village bar “Blind Tiger” is one of the few bars in the city to carry cask beer, so the designated drink was (you guessed it) a cask beer. If a person drinks the “designated” drink, then they hit par on a par 4 hole. If they drink two beers, it is a birdie…take a shot, an eagle, etc. If they choose not to drink, then they bogey and score a 5. Each bar has a tee time limit of 30 minutes before you move on to the next hole. At the end of the 9th hole, you add up the scores and the lowest wins (like in real golf dumbass).

Anyway, I threw in a few loopholes to encourage people to have fun if they were getting too drunk (wait can you EVER get too drunk). I let people take a stroke off if they played a song in the jukebox or played the vintage Mrs. PacMan game at some dive bar.

I thought everyone would enjoy themselves, but honestly, I had no idea it would be such a hit! People were getting super competitive and going for holes in one all over the place. Evan and his friend Gary started out strong and then nosedived towards the 7th hole. They get the Phil Mickelson award. In the end, it was Grant and Dave dueling it out trying to one up each other. I don’t know how many shots they ended up taking, but they were wasted by the end of it. I played it safe and shot for pars and birdies and thankfully did not have a raging hangover the next morning. As any indication of how serious everyone took the game, there were only 4 original golfers who made it to the 10th hole which was an 80’s dance party bar. Oh and Michael (one of the last standing foursome) was not even drinking!

To make things a bit more interesting, I decided the theme should be Rambo plays golf! I had custom made Rambo iron-on’s put on the back of a dozen cheap “I heart NY” shirts picked up in Chinatown. It was AWESOME! The top line read “God would have mercy, RAMBO won’t” which is an actual quote from Rambo 3. I even put agent code names on the bottom to individualize each of our shirts. Mine was SAUSAGES! which I took from that bud light talking dog commercial. Yeah, I rock! It was a easy way to unite the group and have people stare at us as we take over a dive bar. One time a few of us turned around a corner in our shirts and someone yelled out “I love NY too”. They then said “wow you really love NY” when a dozen additional people rounded the corner.

Here are the highlights:
At the 4th hole, a guy was walking around with a random stuffed dog. Yeah strange. Well we all had some fun with it before management took it away from us.

The 5th hole was the Stonewall Inn gay bar. Yeah this is the bar where the Pride Parade originated. The designated drink was a “blow job” shot. Now I don’t know if the gay guys found that humorous, but the bartender sure knew how to pour them. Hmmmmm. Plus my one of my friends stuck a gay male magazine in my purse so I had something to read on the train.

At the 8th hole, another girl was having a birthday party. The bouncer found our concept funny and let me steal one of her balloon bouquets. I carried those around until we hit the 10th bar and a ceiling fan stole them from me! Seriously, I was dancing when they were yanked out of my hand. I pulled a chair over to try to untangle them, but it was so badly wound up that the ceiling fan jammed up. Ooops.