Wheel of misfortune

Hilarity ensued before we even left the box we're staying in for the week.

Jim  managed to wedge my suitcase into a corner, upright, so it could double as a piece of furniture, like a tall   end table if it had to. It was like mastering Tetris, only when you play Tetris, nobody wants to kill you if you tell them you need to retreive something from that suitcase/end table.

We rush through an average buffet dinner, where various culinary offerings and communicable diseases were ours for the taking.

We had reservations to see our first of two comic from Jim's hometown, Cleveland, who was introduced as "someone who's been on Jimmy Kimmel" which made me frustrated that I haven't been,  neither professionally nor sexually.

The comic was good..great even..but then my body suddenly belonged to that of an eighty eight year old, which meant I had to plop myself down to hear some perfectly pleasant singing accompanied by an adequate guitarist.

There was a Beatles tribute just a short deck up, which meant..we were going to miss the Beatles tribute.

We decided to stay for a "Wheel of Fortune" like game in the atrium, which Jim hesitated to attend, because he, unlike me, cannot solves a bonus puzzle like "Quick Fixes" with just the letters "e" and "s" although he does hold his own in the daily Wordle.

So he defers to me and agrees to play the Wheel, but neither of us could have predicted that this would be a hilarious version of the famous hangman show, where if you named a correct letter but couldn't solve the puzzle, you were forced to spin the Wheel of.. what I call..Humiliation" which makes a game of "Double Dare" look like Sunday mass.

Contestants would spin and land on spaces that commanded them to smell a stranger's armpit, or give a stranger a foot massage, or propose to and/or break up with someone they just met,

I submitted my name to be called, only because of my puzzle solving prowess, and was relieved that my name wasn't picked.

But guess who did get called?

I didn't know Audrey very well before this trip.  She was a Facebook friend I met twice--at a camp reunion in 2010 and at a shiva  call in 2017.

I knew she had a reputation of being a very good travel agent and I knew she was planning a trip I always wanted to look into.

She wasn't even planning on attending this event but the Beatles salute was too crowded, and she got picked!

And not even by having her name drawn from the bucket, but just because she was in the front row!

Audrey, who's been on the Jumbo-tron at Madison Square Garden, dancing with The Boss,  talked herself out of the punishment--breakdancing--and instead did a model walk on a pretend catwalk.

(She ultimately did  solve and won a tote bag)

She was asked to have a stranger smell her breath, and I was so tempted to yell out, "it's the happy scent of someone who has kissed Mr. Bruce Springsteen!" but I showed  restraint.

The DJ's assistant made his first faux pas when he asked how Audrey spelled her name, but nothing was funnier than  when her "punishment" was to sing a karaoke version of a famous song.

She asked, naturally, for "Dancing in the Dark" which the DJ didn't know, and she responds with, "okay, how about anything by Bruce Springsteen?" to which the guys says, in all seriousness, "who's that?"

There are questions you just don't ask.

Audrey finally settled on a sweet version of "I Will Survive"..which, luckily the idiot who asked who The Boss is, literally did.

I don't recall laughing like this in a long time, until we saw the second comic from Ohio who was positively brilliant.

We're not even in Alaska yet--haven't seen a single whale--but this is already a fabulous trip!

Time to find my way to the bed in the box and get some well earned slumber...