DRINK IT OR ...

During the spring semester of my sophomore year in college after transferring from Marietta College to the University of Connecticut I lived in the Alumni Quad in a dormitory called Belden.
The Quad had four dorms named Watson, Eddy, Belden, and Brock. Each dorm had eight stories with elevators. As it so happened I went to Belden elementary school in Simsbury, Connecticut named after a philanthropist Horace Belden and my grandmother was the one who suggested in Simsbury to name the elementary school after Mr. Belden.

At the end of each floor was a "study" room that we also could use for some fun as well. From time to time on the weekends we used to play water hearts. Water hearts is a variation of the card game "hearts".

Hearts is played with four people each being dealt 13 cards (one quarter of the deck). Each person then passes three of their cards to another player and gets three cards in return. The game starts off with whomever has the 2 of clubs. You have to follow suit as long as you have a card in that suit. The highest suited card takes the other three cards and next puts down one of their cards. After you run out of the suit played you can start putting in some of your hearts or the dreaded queen of spades. The object of the game is to get as few hearts and avoid the queen of spades as you want to get as few points as possible. Each heart counts as one point and the queen of spades counts for thirteen points. There is one alternative strategy called "shoot the moon" where you try to get all the hearts plus the queen of spades. If you successfully "shoot the moon" then everyone else gets 26 points and you don't get any points. The game is played until someone gets 100 points and that person is the loser.

So, we used to play water hearts where the loser of each round would have to drink a quart of ice water or "wear it" by getting the water thrown on you. It was funny to see some of the players in the game start to look like they were pregnant from all the water they had drunk and also to see at what amount of water people started to say; "That's it I can't drink any more water" and then we would chase that person around until they were cornered and could dowse them in ice water.

Needless to say, this game required a lot of bathroom breaks, but they say drinking water is good for you and that most people don't drink enough water.

Not us. We would "drink it ... or wear it".