Drafted! A memoir

For those of you who associate the word “draft: with beers, first of all: Fair, second of all: Beer. However, this draft night was about fresh meats and tenderizeds and their ascension into fully fledged team-mates.

We all showed up at four thirty that day. Folk brought food and drink in part because IT IS A PARTY, and in part because if you don’t BRING food, you don’t EAT food. Then, after a brief hustle to find scraping instruments, we settled in for the planned activity of the day. And it waaaaaaaaaaasssss

Scraping up tape

Some of us had pretty terrible tools for the job, but that stopped NOBODY. This was one of those times where you’re looking at your whole four inches of handiwork thinking, “THIS WILL NEVER GET DONE,” then you look up, see your team all around you, hacking away at tape, and realize, “Huh. We’ll get this done together. Then we will party. All is right with the world.”

The main event...

We were ushered onto the rink and ordered to stand in a line and close our eyes.

Then they doused us with buckets of freezing water.

...

I’m kidding, I jest I jest.

Instead, they tied a kerchief round our eyes and placed a tiny little envelope in our hands.

I stood there listing from side to side, trying to keep the weight off of a recent horrendous thigh wound (okay it wasn’t, like, a shark bite or anything but it’s about as close to that as I’ve ever come). Someone came up behind me and performed the kerchiefing and enveloping and suddenly it all started getting real.

It was happening.

I was becoming a member of a team. A team with a uniform and a logo and a mascot and catch phrases and whatnot. It would either be the Maidens of Mayhem (aka frickin mermazons), or the High Rollers (lady gamblers. Get it? High rollers, like dice and like skates and never mind here’s a picture) PUNS