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Christmas Spirits
Inebriated Santas and elves stumble through Coconut
Grove in search of trinkets and information
By Angie Hargot
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The Miami Sports and Social Club’s means of
social networking. Photo by Albert Siegel |
A
quick scan of Sandbar Grill revealed the usual
Coconut Grove suspects wearing their usual attire —
pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, expensive watches,
average haircuts and elf costumes. Wait. Elf
costumes?
In yellow spandex baseball pants, a red jersey and a
green elf jacket and hat, Steve Arsenault sat at the
end of the bar nursing a pre-noon beer and preparing
to guide about 100 inebriated Santas and elves on
the Miami Sports and Social Club newest pub crawl:
the “Santa Stumble.”
The inebriated participants, grouped in teams of
three to six people, paid $20 to stumble around
Grove bars under the guise of a scavenger hunt,
while dressed up in elf costumes, dolphin-adorned
Miami Santa hats and red felt elfin pimp fedoras.
Event coordinator Kara Ezrin, donning a green and
red elf hat with pointy ears, began recording
registrants around noon, dutifully scribbling down
names in a black and white marble notebook. The
Santas slowly trickled in for the merrymaking
festivities, some still drunk from their Friday
night festivities. “They’re all hung over,”
Arsenault said.
Then, once the troupes were sufficiently staffed and
red polo shirts abounded, Ezrin leapt up on a chair
to explain the rules.
Each team had to get the bartender at each of the
seven participating bars on his or her assigned
route to sign off on at least two rounds for each
crawler. Their official crawler wristbands gave
participants access to preset drink specials that
included $4 margaritas at Senior Frog’s and $2 Bong
Spirit vodka mixers at Sandbar. Each team, in a feat
of elfin espionage, had to answer trivia questions
about each bar on the journey, a task that would
later prove either tough or expensive. And if all of
that, combined with the overt mission of not
puking, wasn’t hard enough, the teams had to collect
10 items from their stops — such as “one napkin
kissed and signed by a Hooters waitress” — and stow
them in plastic bags.
The whole thing would culminate in a free keg party
at Sandbar at 5:30 p.m., with a $200 gift
certificate to Café TuTu Tango for the winning team
— that is, if they actually made it back — and
Sandbar gift certificates to the best-dressed couple
and the second- and third-place stumblers.
Just moments after getting off work, Scott Smith
stood outside Barracuda, the first bar on his route,
and watched as his Irish teammates on Team Doherty,
named for their Australian team captain, ordered
rounds at the bar. “It’s a multinational gathering
of camaraderie,” Smith said. “This is gonna get
messy.”
Inside, the team sent friendly glares toward Team
Festivus, which included Joaquin and Luis Barberi.
Joaquin, visiting from
Mexico, had been in town just two days. “I came here
for this,” Barberi said. “Just kidding.”
One Team Festivus member, who declined to be
identified, said she went to the Sports and Social
Club’s “golf-themed pub crawl” in August. “I lived
in
New York.
And when I came back it was harder to meet people,”
she said, adding that the pub crawls organized by
the club are “fun and less structured” than the
networking events she attended in the Big Apple.
At Hooters, one team costumed in sunglasses
shared pitchers and proudly displayed the scavenger
hunt items they had smuggled out of bars, including
coasters, the required bar-name-branded item and
even a bottle of hot sauce, which was not on the
list of items they were required to retrieve.
“We’re pretty much done,” said Jessie Smith, err,
Jessie, Princess of Power.
“Everyone’s a winner as long as you’re stumbling and
not crawling,” said Albert O’Mance as he grabbed a
Hooters menu and shoved it into a plastic bag.
By the time they made it to Mr. Moe’s, Team Chris
Elder had changed its name to the Piss-Drunk Puddle
Jumpers.
“Sixteen drinks in three hours,” Elder said. “This
is going to be sick.” Elder recently moved to
South Florida
from Iowa and joined the pub crawl to meet people.
Non-crawler David Falvo, on vacation from
Boston, looked on as the Piss-Drunk Puddle Jumpers
paid their $70 bar tab.
“What do they win … a stomach pump?” Falvo asked. He
didn’t seem too keen on snowbirding back to attend
the club’s next pub crawl — a toga and
gladiator-themed stumble scheduled for February on
Lincoln Road in South Beach. “That’s like 10 hours
of drinking in three hours."
At The Tavern, enterprising bartender Cristy
Diez-Arguelies required the crawlers to do tricks in
exchange for valuable inside information.
Crawlers slurred the same question at her over and
over again: “Who is the GM at The Tavern and when is
his birthday?” as they furiously scribbled down what
beers the bar had on tap — another question on their
trivia forms.
Diez-Arguelies was hardly dishing out that gem for
free, however. “Do something,” she hollered at
contestants, as other crawlers maneuvered around the
now-packed bar, double-fisting beers above their
heads. Hearing her order, many crawlers gave
Diez-Arguelies a confused look.
“I really don’t care about the Christmas spirit,”
said non-costumed crawler John Tierney, a reporter
and producer for KVAL-TV in
Oregon. “Any excuse to drink in the middle of the
day, I’ll take.”
Tierney’s teammate then explained how they had,
well, cheated so future teams couldn’t collect one
of the scavenger hunt items, a matchbook from each
bar. “We took one and then hid the rest of the
matchbooks,” said Kris Lood, explaining that his
team had discovered a “legal loophole,” a Santa
clause, that he refused to reveal, even though
none of them was an attorney and one of the other
teams was loaded with them.
Diez-Arguelies looked on in mild amusement as the
tricks became more lucrative. “I made one guy buy me
a beer, one guy chug three beers [and] one guy gave
me $10,” she said, as a crawler slipped her $20 for
the manager’s name.
As the bartender cranked Dire Straits’ “Money for
Nothing,” Tierney’s team, under smack-talking fire
from rivals Team Rob Reilly, broke into an impromptu
huddle. Reilly was not a crawler, but the “creative
genius” behind Burger King’s chicken fries,
according to stumbler Chuka Schneider. The entire
team, which ultimately won the competition, works
for
Miami advertising giant Crispin Porter and Bogusky.
The excitement was so infectious, one clan even
grabbed SunPost freelance photographer Albert
Siegel and started snapping pictures of him with his
own camera. The amused photographer smiled while
trying to explain which button to push.
Whether stumblers were celebrating their
accomplishments or the sheer fact that they made it
back to the Sandbar, the keg party and awards
ceremony went on well into the evening.
“Everybody had a great time,” said Arsenault, who
finally got home at
10 p.m.
“They all want to have a stumble every month, so I’m
already planning the next one for February.”
Then, with a laugh, he said, “I should have won
‘best dressed,’ though.” |
