PAX: America’s Best, Goose, Yankee Joe, Rain Dance, Popeye, Fence Post, Wet Tap, Safety Valve, Smooth Operator

AO: The Stage

By: Honeysuckle

Nine PAX drove to The Stage in good weather around 5:15 on a Tuesday morning. The hype was a guy running on a beach, yet there was supposed to be not much running. That only left one thing. But first, warmarama.

The energy was medium until the sight of AB’s Large Cinco SUV cornering beautifully from 308 and accelerating smoothly as he put his foot on the Watts. The arrival of Fence Post then sealed the deal. Warmarama was concluded with a short mosey to the stop sign. YHC didn’t say no running.

Thang 1

Last week, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys passed away. On Saturday, Maneater played “Good Vibrations” near the end of his beatdown, so YHC decided to carry the torch and focus on a couple other tunes. The first was “Sloop John B”, essentially a traditional folk song arranged by BW. X-factors throughout the song, with Heels to Heaven on trigger words “Home” and “John”.

Since a few of the PAX were visibly shaking from trivia withdrawls, YHC attempted to create a few questions based on the previous night’s Wikipediaing. First, a sloop has how many masts and how many sails? Surely a softball but YHC now knows that Popeye doesn’t get out of bed for ships with less than 3 masts. A sloop has 1 mast and 2 sails. What is the name for a ship with at least 2 masts? YJ came in with schooner. Finally, what group sang an early version of this song? This group had the same number of members as the Thompson Twins, and this group also sings a song about a subway in Boston. The answer was the Kingston Trio. TerraVanilli would have gotten that one.

But that was not all. The song features the line “this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.” A scrubbing of the exicon revealed the perfect exercise pairing for this, the worst merkin ever. One worst merkin ever consists of a wide grip merkin, a regular merkin, and a diamond merkin. So the PAX did 11’s with this plus jump squats on the other end. It was pretty much the worst merkin ever, and yes, we can even know that. YHC assumes this is part of Wet Tap’s normal morning routine, but as Safety Valve put it, this is one of those that looked good on paper. The 11’s left four on the floor by the end, and Smooth showed his typical grit finishing out his merkins.

Thang 2

The second feature song was “Little Deuce Coupe”, surprisingly to the PAX not about a Prius. In the later trivia, it was revealed that the Deuce Coupe was a Ford (thanks Rain Dance) but the year of 1932 (!) proved elusive, with the “2” in 1932 being the “Deuce”. The song was deuce minutes long, with mountain climbers except when “deuce coupe” was said we’d do zebra kicks. When the trivia began, AB per usual predicted YHC’s questions and offered up that the pink slip referenced in the song meant that he owned it (i.e., the title – in California they were pink). Finally, what movie released about 10 years later prominently featured a Deuce Coupe? AB also had this one, American Graffiti.

The exicon follow on exercise was the Dirty McDeuce, a set of cadence exercises spanning chest, abs, and legs. Since everyone’s chests were burned out, the three exercises were Imperial Walkers, Freddy Mercuries, and Tempo Squats. Each exercise went to 12 count. We did two rounds before YHC remembered that there was supposed to be a lap in between. We ended up doing three rounds. With two minutes left, we thought about all the PAX lying in bed or otherwise were not at the The Stage this morning while listening to Brian Wilson by the Barenaked Ladies. We first held 6 inches then finished with Big Boy Situps.

COT – Announcements, Intentions, Popeye prayed us out.

It’s always one of my favorite parts of the day struggling out there with this group.

SYITG,
Honeysuckle