It’s summertime, and the livin’s easy.
Far too easy.
I’ve never been a huge fan of summer, mostly because I’m always at my leisure, and thus summer is no break for me. But at UCLA, summer is even rougher.
Ben Howland is almost a year away from going to his next Final Four. Karl Dorrell is almost six months away from his rematch against USC. John Savage and the baseball team are another year away from going to their first College World Series.
So what do we do over summer?
We sit. We wait. We hope.
We probably drink a lot. Maybe if we’re under 21, we’ll even try to get into Maloney’s (or whatever you want to call it) by faking a German accent and pretending to be a foreign exchange student who forgot his passport. (I’m not saying it works … just saying it may have worked before.)
Maybe we’ll drink gin for an entire night and cap it off by falling down a hill and losing the will to get back up. (Not saying I’ve done it … just saying that if someone hadn’t gone down to pick me up, I’d still be there.)
But mostly, we wait. We wait for school to start, for football to start, for our days to once again be filled.
While we are waiting, though, we may as well find some things to do.
We can watch the Countrywide Classic. This tennis tournament, which happens every year, is one of my favorite things to cover, mostly because the media gets free beer. But it’s a fine spectator sport as well; it’s usually pretty high-caliber tennis. This would have meant nothing to me a year ago, but after watching a week of it last year, I came to appreciate this sport I once considered on a par with watching the grass grow.
So we can do that.
We can also go watch our basketball players in the SayNo basketball league. They play every year in this league, and while it is mostly street ball, it is a fun way to see the newer players and the ones who don’t play a lot. There is no free beer, so I’m not sure how likely I am to go, but they play in Hollywood now, rather than their old digs in West Los Angeles.
So you could do that, if you’d like.
But really, there is one main thing you need to do to make it through the doldrums of summer.
Maximize your beer consumption.
More to the point, you should maximize your free beer consumption.
Beer makes everything that would be intolerable (watching tennis, going to summer school, being an alcoholic) exceedingly tolerable.
I cannot point you toward too much free beer, because that would be giving away too many secrets, but I can lead you to that other promised land: cheap beer (and other things).
Because the secret is already out, I may as well let you know that Sepi’s has 50 cent pints on Tuesday nights. It used to be 25 cents, but then they started to gouge us and I boycotted for a while. Still, it’s probably the cheapest beer in Westwood (besides 40s of King Cobra).
You’ve also got Maloney’s on Tuesday nights. They have $4 liters, which sounds good in theory, until you: a) realize it’s Miller Lite, and b) are asked to chug a liter of said Miller Lite.
At Palomino, pretty much every night of the week they’ve got their drink special: the Cosmic Rita. It’s pretty cheap, they put a lot of tequila in it, and if you can get past the fact that it is named the Cosmic Rita, you’re set.
Finding cheap things to drink is a sport ““ nay, the sport of summer.
What else are you going to do? Summer school?
Avoid straight gin and e-mail Woods at dwoods@media.ucla.edu.