Cousin Dinner

I have some great cousins.  They're purty funny.  Every.Single.One.  When we get the chance, we all get together for Cousin Dinner.  There are 9 cousins, one cousin-in-law (John), and one baby cousin (Burl).  {One was missing.  Alex, we missed you.}


We are: A soldier. A babysitting queen. A nurse. A coach. A photographer. A finance guy.  A political guy. An engineer.  Me, the cook.   

Our time together has evolved from hide-n-seek at Mimi's house.  Now, we eat and laugh and sometimes play Pictionary.  It gets intense.  There's been blood.  Mostly we laugh.  

I think that we are all funny in our own way, but no one is as funny as my cousin Ryan.  Here he is with the best pictionary drawings of the night:


The words were Polar Bear and Candelabra.  The polar bear was on ice skates.

His stories are epic.  Usually when I tell a funny story, my audience gives me a sympathetic laugh and says, "huh.  Guess you had to be there."  With Ryan, he finishes a story and I think, "MAN.  I wish that I could have been there."

He had one for us.  It goes into my "top 5" Ryan stories.  I'll butcher it, but stay with me.

He's in college and joins a speech class a week late.  He gets to class and the teacher says, "So you join the class late and I have to let you in now?"
Ryan-"Yep.  That's how it works."
Teacher-"well I'm not letting you off the hook.  You have to give an instructional brief today.  Does anyone in the class want to tell Ryan what an instructional brief is?"

Ryan-"I think I've got it.  I give instructions and they have to be brief.  Ok."

He sits down and the guy before him mentions what a cougar is-and it's not the animal.  He gets up and decides to do a speech on how to pick up a cougar.  

"Alright.  Head on over to the Palms.  You know where the Palms is?  It's over on Lee Highway and that place is crawling with cougars.  Loosen your tie, head out on the dance floor, do a couple of these moves {he does the moves for the class} and the cougars will be pouncin' off the walls."

He said the whole class was cracking up.  A huge football player just kept his head down and shook because he was laughing so hard.  When he got done, he sat down, and the teacher said, "oh, that was REAL cute."  She was the only one in the class that had been to the Palms.  

He got an A.