A friend of mine from school and I were in the back seat of my dad's car, waiting for my parents to come out of a bar in Stanley, ID one summer night. This was back in the mid-50's...my little brother was in the car with us too. I must have been 12 or so, Myrna and I had come up from Twin Falls, camping with my folks, to earn a couple of Camp Fire Girls badges we needed. Dad was a Boy Scout Leader and an avid outdoors man, so we spent a lot of time up in the Sawtooth Mountains.
The annual Stanley Stomp was going on at the time so Mom and Dad had decided to stop in for a drink or coffee, whatever, before the long drive home.
Myrna, my brother Alan and I were amusing ourselves with trivia, trying to name the Seven Dwarfs, It was dark, and we were full of too much weekend, and just got sillier as minutes progressed; too tired to think straight but clinging to the shared company, in the dark, unwilling to give in to the good tired feelings.
We could name six of the Dwarfs:Dopey, Grumpy, Doc; Sleepy, Happy and Sneezy....the last Dwarf wouldn't come out of the reaches of our shallow pre-pubescent recesses, but we were having lots of giggles as we chanted the names to burn them into our memory. Even then we knew that the seventh name would come when we least expected it, so we needed to memorize.
Chanting the names led to twisted tongues...Dopey...Dumpy...Groc...and on until we collapsed at our clever hilarity. Myrna and I were the queens of funny.
We were laughing and rolling around on the seat of the old Chevy...the tearful giggles surely would have been heard by any passerby, but everyone was in the bar, enjoying an adult evening of swing dancing and whoop-up.
This little episode I recall so vividly probably didn't last any longer than fifteen minutes tops, before my parents were back in the car and heading south for home, but never for an instant have I forgotten it. Truly I was blessed with the gift of being easily amused.
Thirty some years later, in a bar in Pocatello, Idaho on a women's pool league night...my team was beating the pants off the bar team, and the cheap arsed manager, who was trying to get out of buying a round for we visitors, announced over the PA,
"I'll give a free pitcher of beer to anyone who can name the Seven Dwarfs."
Like a drunken juggernaut I headed for the bar where he stood.
"Make it a round for my team and you're on!"
"Okay, but you'll have to write them down",
Did he think I couldn't write?
"Fine. Give me a piece of paper and a pen, and start pouring, I'll be done before you are."
And of course, I was! Dopey, Grumpy, Doc, Sleepy, Happy, Sneezy, and Bashful.
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