The Sober-Chick Challenge

Not long ago, I was out with a couple friends, and we hit this one spot in possession of a beautiful hostess. A striking, Grade A, exotic model type, and so one of my friends gets assertive, makes some moves, and they strike up a little convo. Over the course of the next hour or two we find out she is in fact a model, just recently moved to NYC, and that she's sweating the owner of the bar a little something (first two things we found out directly, last thing we found out through observation).

Much like The Bartending Muse, a situation where you're hitting on the hot hostess requires a lot of nuance, and ultimately a high tolerance for failure. And over the next hour or two, when she was busy doing her hot-hostess duties, we speculated on my friend's chances. The results of our analysis were ultimately inconclusive, and we decided to chalk up this first experience to "seed planting" and figure we'd come back another time to follow up and see if any flirting-flora had come to bloom.

We moved on to another spot nearby, and once again my friend's eye was caught, this time by a bartender. This bartender was a bit more, how do you say it, accessible. She was good looking, certainly, but the hostess girl was like a right-off-the-fashion-pages, 'bout-to-be-scooped-up-by-a-mogul-with-a-yacht, gotta-waste-all-your-time-punching-ni**as-in-the-face-for-staring-too-hard type. And the bartendress was a little more ghetto.

So empowered by the slightly lower barrier-to-entry, my friend gets proactive and starts kicking it with the bartender. And she's giving all the right signals, she's laughing at all his jokes, telling us, his friends, that he's funny, hooking us up with drinks etc. But then my friend suggests that we all do a shot together, and she reveals that she doesn't drink. And, well, that's where I punched out, because I knew the game was over. I knew my friend would not be up for The Sober-Chick Challenge.

When the bartender left, my friend was still excited about the prospects. I didn't want to be a game-hater, chipping away at his house-of-confidence, so I couched my thoughts in the context of our experiences with the previous girl he was hitting on. I told him I thought he'd have a better chance of getting with the America's Next Top Model chick, versus the sober bartender.

I explained that if his objective was to get a little carefree action, no drama, the hot model may be a little more difficult in the initial approach, but once you got in there, you'd be in there. Kind of like Harvard, difficult to get in, but then you're good to go [insert Taco Bell hand signal]. Alcohol and drugs serve as helpful study guides on your way to getting that BHD (Booty Holla Degree?). Meanwhile Sober Chick U is no joke, and they provide no study aids. These girls gonna have you taking SAT's, writing essays, doing interviews, getting letters of reference, all of that, with only your stone-cold sober brain to help.

On top of that alcohol is the Game Enhancer. You ever try to kick game in the museum? Sh*t is laughable son. If they had alcohol flowing in the Museum of Natural History, you might be able to get a little tee-hee when you say, "I've got a T-Rex in my pants that's 'bout to eat your Brontosaurus ass girl!" as you walk past the dinosaur exhibit. Or at the MOMA, "if you come by my place, please wake me up before you Van Gogh-Gogh." With a few (hundred) drinks in her, maybe you get a smile out of that. But sober all you're going to get is, "did you just say i had a Brontosaurus ass?!!?!?"

And it doesn't stop there. The sober-chick challenge means you have to exert max energy through all the games of the Relationship Olympics. The 500-meter walk through the bookstore. The 800-meter clothes shopping hurdle. The cell-phone/javelin toss when anyone calls or text messages while she's talking. Synchronized Spooning etc. etc. etc.

I'm not saying all that is prohibitive, and sober-chicks should be off the radar, but most guys would like to get a little taste before figuring out if they want to start serious training (that is what a relationship is right, training?). All I'm saying is acknowledge the challenge while you're out in the field, make sure you add at least one or two degree-of-difficulty points when she tells you she doesn't drink. Maybe even a couple more if you encounter her at a bar, because obviously sober chicks at bars have something suspicious going on.

That is all. In the end I was proven right because sober bartender gave up the digits to my boy, but then wanted to go to ballets, operas and other flaccidity-inducing cultural events.

Now I'm going to go track down the girl in this picture and tell her about the T-Rex in my pants.