Texas Lou

Alot of people think it’s strange that I played bar as an adolescent.  I never thought it was out of the ordinary until I received this feedback from my peers.

There was this one specific instance that I remember when I was about 12 or 13.  We had cousins and friends spending the night and the seven of us decided to play bar.  I must have been the ringleader since I was the oldest. We took turns as both the bartender and the customers.  We served grape juice as red wine and lit the ends of pretzel sticks with a book of matches that we had somehow gotten our hands on.  We had a blast and it was all good, clean fun.  I guess we had outgrown playing house or school and needed something a little more grown-up to occupy our imaginations!

Years later, when reminiscing with friends about our childhoods, I asked surprised, “Yall never played bar?”  I had always assumed that was one of those games that all kids played at some point during their childhood.  Now it doesn’t surprise me that all seven of us turned out to be drinkers (not alcoholics, but ones who enjoy a few beers every now and then).

So what I took away from this discovery that playing bar was not a run-of-the-mill game played by all children is that it was really harmless and probably resulted from the fact that the fairly new house we had moved into had a sunken bar that had to be incorporated into our make-believe games.  And it could have been worse…we could have been playing bar with real wine and real cigarettes instead of grape juice and pretzels.  Or even worse, we could have been playing doctor!

So what I want to know is did any of you (all three of you out there reading this) ever play bar or anything else unconventional?