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This year I am proud to announce that the tradition of not shopping, and sitting in a (strip) mall bar instead, will continue at The Good Life Bar and Grill (TGL) promptly at 11:00 AM on Friday.
Here’s what I had to say about TGL in my column earlier this year in the Omaha World-Herald…The Good Life Sports Bar and Grill.
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Come get your free HitThatDive shirt tomorrow. While supplies last! |
Show up with a pack of Camel (non-filters) or wearing a cowboy hat and I, Scuba Steve, will buy your first drink and give you a HitThatDive t-shirt to proudly add to your collection!
But, what exactly are the origins of BlackOUT Friday? And, how does someone properly celebrate it…let me explain.
I too had recently ended a four year relationship with my college girlfriend…which meant that neither Smitty or I (being newly single and hopefully unemployed) were feeling very festive for the upcoming holidays.
And we thought, “what the hell”, let’s see if we can find some Christmas spirit and hit the mall after a few beers and see what all the crazy people were up to. In order to not look like complete degenerates, we enlisted one of our more upstanding friends (Chic) to join us. To this day, Chic IS still married to his high school sweetheart.
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Not the original |
We had some wings, a few too many beers, walked around the mall, made fun of people that we knew there and eventually went home. It was an amusing way to kill an afternoon and all agreed to do it again the following year.
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Smokes anyone? |
1993-1996: The new “rule” for the day after Thanksgiving was that you were not allowed to coordinate meeting at the mall bar. It was a word-of-mouth invitation and either you showed up or you didn’t. During these next five years, a few things happened:
- We seemed to get progressively drunker every year;
- More people started to “attend” our yearly ritual;
- Shots became part of the tradition;
- They put a bar IN the mall
Being their busiest day of the year, I have to assume that the management of Ruby Tuesday were not very thrilled to have a bunch of drunk rowdies in the place chasing off the customers that were there for a quiet lunch.
How do I know that? I believe we were asked to leave several times…which we promptly ignored. Somehow we befriended an honest-to-goodness cowboy that we referred, oddly enough, only as “Cowboy”.
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3-2-1 RUN! |
We decided that, since it was the start of the holiday season, we should join in the spirit of giving. Not wanting to actually go shopping, we decided to buy a few packs of Camel (non-filters) from the vending machine and hand them out to all the mothers and daughters that were eating lunch.
As we get ready to leave, Cowboy asks us “where to next?” To say Cowboy was a bit creepy is an understatement.
Things get a little fuzzy from there, but I do remember Cowboy being much harder to lose than my drunken brain had anticipated. All I really remember about the rest of the day:
- Not sure how I got home
- Stopping at someone’s house because they had a beermeister
- Smitty out cold in a car
- “Falling asleep” and coming to just in time to watch Pete Gonzalez of Pitt beat West Virginia in the “Backyard Brawl”. Of note…this game is no longer even played.
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The gift that keeps giving |
1998: Mrs. HitThatDive caught wind of a few of the stories from the year before and implemented a new system. Everyone who attended this year was given 6 drink coupons for a program that she would administer. One coupon handed to her allowed you to purchase one beer, and handing her two coupons allowed you to purchase a shot.
They were non-transferable, and once the coupons were all gone, she would drive us home. Safe to say, the day did not end with a group of us drunkenly sprinting through a crowded mall to escape from Cowboy.
1999-present: I haven’t been in the Pittsburgh-area for Thanksgiving since 1998, but to this day the tradition of BlackOUT Friday proudly has continued in Northern Virginia and now for more than decade right here in Nebraska!
Whether in Pizzeria Uno inVirginia, the now defunct Draft House in Omaha, or even Jerry’s Bar in Benson…I have lived up to my word more than two decades ago that no matter where I am, I’ll be seated in a bar at 11:00 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving to have a beer(s) and toast all the friends from over the years that I wish were sitting there with me.
Now…who wants some shots at The Good Life Bar and Grill. I’m buying!
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