LAST MAN SITTING

I went on a week long vacation to Freeport in the Bahamas on Lucaya Beach in the early 1980's. I was there on a package tour from TNT vacations that included air and hotel.

The manager of the hotel hosted a cocktail party for our tour in the hotel ballroom with complimentary rum punch and assorted snacks. For entertainment they had a game of musical chairs set up and asked for about twenty volunteers to participate in the game with the prize for the winner being a bottle of champagne.

Musical chairs involves walking as a group single file around and around a line of chairs while they have music playing and then sitting in one of the available chairs when the music stops. There is always one more person than the amount of chairs so that the person who doesn't have a chair to sit in is eliminated from the game and then the game continues with one less chair and so on until you are left with one chair and two people and the winner is the person who is sitting in the final chair.

I entered the musical chair festivities. They started playing some calypso music and then of course stopped the music and we were on our way through the elimination process. I used to be a drummer so I started to pick up a pattern of how long each music session was before the break to scramble for a seat as they played the music for approximately the same amount of time before each pause. Most people during the contest would move forward towards the first available empty chair they found.

The game continued and a couple of times I pulled out the "reverse pivot" move which is when you pivot and sit in the chair in back of you instead of going for the chair in front. I ended up being the "last man sitting" and won the bottle of champagne. That was fun and I always get a kick out of champagne.