Sleeveless Saturdays

When I used to frequent BJ's on a near daily basis there was a particular group of people who still attend these bars in a group to this day. They had a name for their little cabal but due to the lack of a desire to get punched squarely in the face I will refrain from using this name. We will call them "The Pals". Now the Pals were the kind of people who liked to drink, and for that reason I built a somewhat friendly bond with them. However, over time they decided that drinking was no longer fun on it's own and must be accompanied by kitschy, silly theme nights. This was often not an issue because in their minds, this allowed them to get even sloppier which meant more fun for me watching them. However that all changed one particular Memorial Day weekend 4 or so years ago.

It's the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. The clock strikes midnight and all of a sudden one of the Pals runs up to the bar and asks for, nay DEMANDS, a pair of scissors. He then walks up to one of his buddies and begins the cut the sleeves of his shirt off. (Now, I am making an assumption when I guess that this grouping was straight. I know these guys and know that they have a few lady friends who I know, in many cases this is how I know the guys.) I shake it off, no telling what seems like a good idea when you've had a few too many. All of a sudden none of these fellas have sleeves on their shirts and they are now going up to random, equally fratty looking gentlemen and asking to cut their sleeves. This, to my suprise, is not greeted by punches or replies of "Dude that's fucking gay, get out of here" but rather by enthusiastic responses of "YEAH DUDE TOTALLY". It was at this moment I realized that the whole world had lost it's goddam mind. Or at least a particularly visible segment there of. Eventually they get to me, I respectfully decline, and figure well that was a dumb idea for a night.

Fast forward to the next week. Again with the friggin' shearing of sleeves. This continues for the next couple of weeks. It got to the point where I would wear collared shirts with sleeveless undershirts simply to save the sleeves of my shirts I liked because they had decided that since I was friends with them and friends with their friends I was subject to the laws and tenets of Sleeveless Saturday. I would go so far as to say before I came up with the idea of just having a sleeveless shirt available they took my sleeves against my will no less than 4 times. I was sleeve-raped. Oh it must have run it's course, you say? Nope. It evolved. About a month after the inaugural Sleeveless Saturday, these gentlemen begin showing up in themed outfits. I shit you not. One week it was work shirts, one week it was bowling shirts, one week it was cheap hoodies, bad sweaters, sailor shirts, polyester shirts. You name it, this group of dudes each week spent hours, if not days, plotting which theme shirt they would GO TO THE STORE AND BUY, simply to cut the sleeves off at midnight. This to this day strikes me as a tremendous waste of money and fairly latently homo-erotic. Anyways, this continues until Labor Day weekend when these guys, in an effort to give the ridiculous thing they made up a proper send off, they had custom shirts printed up with their own, never-before-uttered catchphrases on the back. These dudes made up witty sayings to have printed on the back of their individual shirt, which they paid to have made, simply so they could then lop the goddam sleeves off of them at midnight. This to them, was a sacred rite and since it was the last one of the year it was a members-only cutting of sleeves. None of us rubes who were not ordained members of the tribe of the Pals were allowed to have our sleeves cut off. This tidbit of information was delivered with the gravity of a high school advisor telling you that since you were failing Spanish you couldn't walk with your classmates nor receive a diploma. I was relieved and also shocked at the level of social importance these dudes assumed we all held for their little stripper party.

For about a year afterwards the bar kept a little shrine to the incredible ridiculousness that was Sleeveless Saturday. They ran some twine along the ceiling and on that twine was one sleeve from each member for each of the theme nights they had there. It may still be there, after a while I just stopped caring enough to look at the ceiling.