by Daniel Bean and Robert Devine
Dan and I are just sitting in my office in beautiful Riverside. We’re supposed to be hammering out a sports column, but instead we are debating whether Milwaukee’s Best or Meister Brau is better cheap beer and playing a game where we try to hit a foam golf ball out of my slightly ajar second story window.
Anyway, we usually cook up this Jambalaya of mindless meanderings at Danny Boy’s house, but Mrs. Danny Boy recently whipped out a Pete Rose-like ban for life on me. It has something to do with the Jax Bar Casino night and me convincing Dan that we could buy real Cummer Museum art with the casino dollars and getting kicked out of the joint, but I am not sure. During our ousting, we did not spill a drop, but we were talking like Keith Richards and Ron Wood from The Rolling Stones so no one could understand what we were saying to each other.
Where were we? Oh yeah, no ideas for the column.
We are dying here! The pressure of coming up with sports column material on a monthly basis has us splashing cold water on each other’s face by using a soaked extra large sponge and screaming in Sylvester Stallone voices, “cut me, Mick!” We figure we must be dead when we pull up the Anna Kournikova website and we look at each other and say, “nothing . . . I’m not getting anything out of this.” We both consider whether it would be better to simply retire from law league duties or dress up in drag to find out what really goes on in the Jacksonville Womens Lawyers Association meetings. We decide on the latter because how many opportunities are there to dress up in drag and pawn it off for a legitimate purpose? Plus, we can recreate that scintillating show, “Bosom Buddies.” Of course, this brings up the new argument as to who gets to play Tom Hanks and who is relegated to be the prettier, but having a future career relegated to the Disney Channel’s Parker Stevenson.
Let’s get the mindless sports stuff out of the way early so we can move on to more interesting topics. Basketball season is under way as Florida Coastal looks to defend its title. Seeing FCSL’s team brings up one observation. Is the school using LSAT scores to set its admission standards? Because Dan and I are pretty sure the Presidential Fitness Test scores are being used as the primary determining factor.
Other teams will be pretty good, as usual. Smith Hulsey has the duo of Steve Moore and Patrick Coll. Better Tritt has Erik “Looooooong” Berger and David Dearing. The State Attorneys can compete with Mike Zima and Jeff Moody. Back to Erik Berger for a second. Dan and I came up with the cool concept of having him play Joe Barrister, where women in the area compete for a date with him under the guise that he was a successful lawyer. Not one local female attorney applied for the show. Luckily, though, the Daily Record is a big hit in the Duval County Jail and the Property Appraiser’s Office so there were plenty of contestants to choose from. Unfortunately, Berger backed out at the last moment due to fear of losing an extremity or getting “shanked.” What a baby!
Dan and I have decided that this is Better Tritt’s year. Instead of analyzing the relative strength and talent of each team, we decided that Better Tritt will win it all this year because of all the teams, it has the best ability to stink up a locker room after a game. Those guys’ sweat socks, we believe, have a collective stink factor of 10 on a 1-10 scale. It might rise to being a 13 if Tod Eikner follows his “mojo” theory of wearing the same pair without washing them for as long as the team wins.
Dan and I finally agree on something. Instead of going with the normal MVP Awards in sports, we have renamed it the “You’re So Money You Don’t Even Know It” Award after the Academy Award Winning movie “Swingers.” How that movie has not become the American Male’s Bible we’ll never know. We were only able to come up with this idea after going roller skating to recreate the heady days of late grade school. We really hit our stride when we starting “checking” adolescent boys as we pretend to be two of the Hanson triplets from the 1977 classic film “Slapshot” during the playing of the song “My Cherona!” Good times. The fun ends when Dan and I insist that we qualify for the couples skate because we don’t want to miss out on quality “ice time” during the playing of the classic love song “Faithfully” by “Journey.”
And finally, it is over. We have just been advised that several law firms in this town have filed an emergency motion for temporary injunction seeking to prevent us from ever attempting to form coherent sentences in print ever again. Pat Coleman of my firm, and George Gabel of Dan’s firm, have changed the passwords on our computer. Sounds like you’ll see next month’s column written in crayon from a courthouse detention cell as Dan and I recreate the movie “Stir Crazy.” We are already arguing who is going to play the role of Richard Pryor and who is stuck playing Gene Wilder. Either way, somebody needs to send some wigs into the jail so we can get the feel of the part. Method actors we are not. We do agree on one thing. We are going to ask Smith Hulsey’s Troy Smith to shave his head and play prison bunkmate Grossberger.