Calling women "wench" and getting away with it

I had never heard of Medieval Times before, but I drove by it a couple of times and after having it explained to me, made an executive decision to get a group of my friends together to go there. Essentially, the idea is that each Medieval Times location is a castle-looking structure with a small stadium inside. They serve you food that you eat with your hands and watch a little show. According to their website, "with clockwork precision, legions of serving wenches and serfs deliver four courses to hungry guests in minutes." The show is comprised of horsemanship (spearing targets and such) and then a long storyline of fighting towards the end.

Really, the only reason not to go is that it costs like $50. It's also pretty far away, but the potential for absurdity far outweighed the costs in this case. After assembling a truly awesome group of participants, we set out this past Saturday for Arundel (sounds like grundle) Mills mall -- the closest Medieval Times location. Upon arrival, we are informed that we are table five (ah ah ah ah taaaable five, taaable five...). I also notice, upon arrival, that Meatsquads is wearing blue jean overalls over his hippo shirt. Apparently the people working there were cracking up over him every place he went. Our section is also cheering on the Blue Knight. We're psyched. We got our picture taken with the Princess from the show. Then we saw the Blue Knight.

The kid looks like a pre-pubescent Legolas, and about .001% as badass. He messed up on a bunch of the training exercises, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, I shouted "He's just hustling you!" at the other knights. Especially the showboating asshole Green Knight. I guess he was pretty cool in the end, as he won, but he was, in the end, owned. Either way, they did a lot of prancing around on horses, which made me quite impatient. "I WANNA SEE SOME CORPSES!" was the battle cry of my end of the table, er, I guess just me in this case.

The Black & White Knight was a total sally. I can't believe he got as far as he did in the tournament. He was all tiptoing around on his horse and shit. Total sally. And I let him know as such.

In the midst of all of this, we were given our food, which was actually pretty good. Except for the garlic bread, which I'm sure was brimming with ye olde trans fats. They gave us a half-a-chicken which was cooked well and tender. They also gave us A SPARE RIB. Just one. On the napkin/menu, it's listed with all of the other courses, so I was kind of perturbed when only ONE RIB found its way onto my plate. For the record though, the dude who served us was a great waiter. Big ups to Robert.

His manager was a douche though. All the stupid kids in front of us got flags, but when we (Max) went over to the empty seats next to us and took the clearly not-being-used flags, he comes over and demands to see our receipts. Then when we cannot procure said receipts, he angrily collects the flags from us and puts them back in the cups by the empty seats. We bitched about it to Robert, he agreed that the dude was an "asshole." I mean seriously, these flags were a smitch of ribbon tied to an overly long straw. Literally they could not have costed more than three cents on ye olde balance sheete. Anyways, that was kind of a buzzkill, but once the food arrived I kind of stopped caring.

Once we were more-or-less done with the food, the real Medieval Timery started. JOUSTING. SWORDFIGHTS. MACES. Of course, our knight got owned fairly early on in the fighting. And certainly not over lack of cheering. We had his back the whole way through, despite his girlish mane of hair. Our dude kicked the Black & White Knight in the nuts, which prompted both Tufsky and I to shoot up from our seats with fists raised and shouts of "FINISH HIM!! FINISH HIM!!"

In the meantime, there was the wager of the evening. I had promised Lyle that if he could get one of the serving wench's phone numbers, I would pay for his dinner (no small sum, again, it was $50 per person). Not only that, but he had to do so using exclusively old-timey English. I was sitting there watching one of the sallies prance around on horseback, when one of the relatively cute serving wenches comes up and says "I've heard the services of a wench are required?" I chuckled at the promiscuous sound of that, but sent her down to Lyle's end of the table, realizing what this meant. I was told Lyle was spitting a lot of "thou" and "court," but was in the end unable to get her number. He WAS, however, able to give her his number. Of course, that was not part of the bet, so no compensation was incurred.

Either way, the rest of the show was pretty much same-old, same-old, as medieval swordplay goes. Definitely a fan of the mace as a medieval weapon. Tufsky and Meatjobs made bets on two of the knights, and when Meats was cheering on his knight as he approached our end of the ring, the knight gave him a smile and a wink. I've been told that's the point when he knew he would lose the bet. And lose he did.

In the end, it was a great night, with rave reviews from most people. I kind of wish we were in a round table setting. Instead it was like a major lecture hall - long rows of seats looking into the ring. Despite this, it was a lot of fun and I would recommend everyone go at least once.