Uptown bar-crawl tradition just keeps a-shufflin’ along
By Corey Ryan
September 4, 2008
Staring into the falling sun on the cusp of our research expedition’s first stop, we sat at the testing ground with the first variables at our fingertips.
“I bet I know something these two boys don’t know,” said the older gentlemen sitting at the end of the Cat’s Den bar. “Do you know that girls don’t have to pee when they poop?”
“No, sir,” I said, noticing the uncomfortable look sweep across the female bartender’s face. “But I would have never thought to ask.”
That was just one question I had answered when I partook in the notorious Athens tradition known as the Court Street Shuffle, a popular event these days with students piling back into campus like clowns in a clown car. The Cat’s Den bartender told me that since she started in April, she has seen an average of one shuffle a week and she only works Thursday evenings.
“It’s nice on my part because I get them while they are sober,” she said.
Another guy seeking a drink scowled at me for delaying his beer, sending my roommate Larry and I out to consume a combined $64.50 worth of beer, booze, a Big Mamma’s Burrito and a pack of cigarettes.
But the tradition of the Court Street Shuffle is beyond Larry and me. Just when and why did the shuffle become an institution worthy of novelty posters?
Back before the 1966 switch from semesters to quarters, students at surrounding Midwest schools flocked to Athens, widely considered the Ft. Lauderdale of the North, for two reasons: it’s not too far from the highway that heads toward Ft. Lauderdale and there are quite a few relatively cheap bars.
Sure, Halloween and the spring festivals have developed into the party events, but I did not go through four fake IDs because I wanted to crash house parties.
My back-home barber Fran, a Tommy Chong clone with an Afro instead of a ponytail, does not spill out flashbacks of visiting his “special lady friend” at OU during the ’60s because he remembers a raging block festival or a rambunctious house party. He was telling me about Court Street ever since I walked into his shop with my first Bobcat T-shirt four years ago. Fran remembers the bars and how much trouble he had walking back to his special lady friend’s dorm because of Jeff Hill.
One day, a group of students probably thought “there are so many bars with so many personalities; what is wrong with trying to visit each in one evening?”
If a shuffler were to start on West Union Street, proceed toward Court and head north, he or she could visit 22 bars while walking about a mile. Any combination of those 22 has been construed as a Court Street Shuffle, where a group of bar patrons walks from bar to bar, getting a drink at each.
Larry and I, and eventually a few others along the way, set out to do a 17-bar shuffle, only to have Skipper’s and 19 South not be open, for a grand total of 15. Because of our livers and wallets, we never intended to go to the Oak Room, Buffalo Wild Wings, Tony’s, Casa Cantina or the Blue Gator (which was closed anyway).
We did go against the popular tradition of using a felt marker to write things on shuffle T-shirts and in restrooms. We didn’t do any of this. (Yet, Larry’s contradictory sense of public decency, while recoiling from marking T-shirts and restroom walls, allows him to inflict upon the world his rendition of “Part of Your World” from “The Little Mermaid” [his talent-show performance when he won Mr. Ohio University 2007]).
The marking tradition is common during shuffles with each mark on a person’s clothing or skin supposedly representing a drink he or she has consumed.
I did take notice of some of the shuffle names on the restroom walls. Two approaches are the pop culture phrase, such as “That’s What She Said Shuffle 2008,” and the offensive remark, such as “My Dad Beat The Gay Out Of Me Shuffle 2008.”
Although I am unable to help with the naming of your next shuffle, if you should ever go on one, I can give you some other advice.
First, plan out with your group what kind of drink you’ll get before you go into each bar. You do not want to chug a beer to catch up to the group of shot drinkers. Although the rule for mixing drinks is beer before liquor and you will never be sicker, there is a different strategy to long-distance drinking.
What worked for me was mixing long, pacing stops with short stops. During my long stops, I spent about 25 minutes on one beer, but on shorter stops, I took a shot and got out of the bar in about three minutes. The delayed reaction to liquor plays a part in this, though since the shots I took came from the bar’s “well,” that saved me in the end.
Second, plan a snack stop at the midway point. This did wonders for me and would have left me nearly unscathed, except I made the mistake of having a drink that has plagued me for over two years.
Yes, avoid Junction Punch, especially on Thursday nights (Quad night). Every bad decision past 10 o’clock results from that putrid pink drink. Live and learn, right? Well, not so much. I made that mistake again during our shuffle.
Finally, when your drunk shuffle-mate/girlfriend’s roommate gets denied at Broney’s, that last stop, pull a MacGyver by sneaking in and throwing down that last shot like a marathon runner through the finish line.
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