SPIRITS : Stadium smugglers get their gear
Posted on Sunday, September 7, 2008
People complain about how younger folks don’t appreciate the advantages they have inherited. All kids want to do is text message, play Madden 09 and ink up their shoulders with the Chinese characters for “clerical help.” Maybe so. But in some ways it was a lot easier in the old days. When the Drinkies desk was in college, we didn’t have to worry about whether we should pledge MySpace or Facebook. We didn’t have to decide between PlayStation, Xbox and Wii systems. We didn’t have to worry about our parents going into heart-crushing debt to send us to graduate school in Tokyo.
If we did worry, not only could many of us legally take a drink when we turned 18, we could stick a pint of Canadian Mist in our sock (or in our date’s purse ) and walk through any turnstile in the United States of America without worrying about some John Law in a chrome, yellow security bib confiscating our anxiety medication.
Yessir, back in our day, hip flasks were as much a part of college football as raccoon coats, porkpie hats, ukuleles and pennants on a stick. All we had to do was pour out half of the watered-down Coca-Cola in the souvenir plastic cup with the schedule printed on the side, pour in a cheap hooch of choice and watch old Bronko drop-kick the pigskin through the uprights. Sis boom bah.
Nowadays an 18-year-old can sign up to ship out to liberate foreign oil fields and kill jihadists but can’t have a legal sip of Southern Comfort. (Everybody can see that’s just plain wrong, even college presidents. ) And nobody gets to bring their own poison into a sporting event in an American stadium anymore.
Unless they’re sneaky.
Now we have to say — really, our lawyers said so — that we don’t condone underage drinking or the flouting of stadium rules. We’re just saying that it’s not hard to find items designed to facilitate the surreptitious consumption of alcoholic beverages in public.
We recently ran across a Web site — www. papabert. com — that bills itself as “The Sneaky Drinking Headquarters !” Papa Bert, whom we can only assume is a real person who resembles the bewhiskered and bandanaed cowboy that adorns the company’s home page, markets a line of products targeted at those unwilling or unable to buy alcohol from legitimate stadium vendors, if they exist.
This isn’t exactly a new idea; one of the items I wish I’d scrounged from my father’s old bar — I did salvage the bar itself— was a good-size plastic flask disguised as a transistor radio. It wasn’t a pocket model but measured nearly 8 inches tall, and a couple of shot glasses and a funnel were stowed in the fake battery compartment in the back. Unscrew the “antenna” and you’d discover a spout.
I don’t think this flask ever got any real use — my best guess is that it was a novelty gift — but it was well-drafted and the details were such that it would easily pass a cursory inspection. It would have worked.
You can find these flasks and others like them online (they’re the sort of items that people who sell things on eBay sell ) but in today’s iPod world you wouldn’t expect them to be very effective. Nobody carries radios like that into ballgames any more and if you showed up at the gate at War Memorial with one you’d probably set the Homeland Security spider sense to tingling — the times we live in are such that people might suspect you’re smuggling something more volatile than Old Charter in the thing.
Fake binoculars have also been around for a long time — so long that almost any pair is suspect. It’s also easy to discern if a pair of binoculars are functional, increasing the risk of discovery (and ejection ). Better might be the “cell phone” flasks that have appeared in recent years. The ubiquity of the cell phone means it’s highly unlikely stadium personnel would ever ask you to prove the device was in fact a cell phone — a possible drawback is that cell phones are pretty small, and most cell phone flasks hold only 3 or 4 ounces of fluid (the 8-ounce models we’ve seen advertised strain credulity — the idea is to not call attention to the conveyance ).
But Papa Bert has covert drinking gear that’s far more sophisticated than fake phones or binoculars. Consider his “Fully Loaded Sneaky Drinking Package” for the low, low bargain price of $ 89. 99 (as opposed to $ 159. 99 when components are bought separately ).
The package consists of:
One “Sipping Seat,” a fully functional stadium seat cushion that has a concealed inner bladder that holds up to 36 ounces of liquid, or “20 shots, 2. 1 beers, or a bottle of wine.” The seat, which will support up to 300 pounds, is available in 14 different color combinations.
One “Beerbelly,” a flexible polyurethane “bladder” and dispensing tube concealed in an adjustable and flexible neoprene harness worn around the waist and under one’s shirt that holds up to 80 ounces — “more than a six-pack of beer !” One “Barnoculars” binocular flask with two chambers that hold 8 ounces of liquid each. One pair of “Sneaky Shorts,” a “wearable concealable beverage container” designed to fit underneath shorts or pants that holds up to 24 ounces. One stainless steel cell phone flask that holds 4 ounces.
One miniature “Key Chain Flask” that holds an emergency backup shot.
Decked out in this gear, Papa Bert assures us we can bring “123 shots, 13 beers, or 6. 2 bottles of wine into any event !” And we will be “literally a walking bar !” and — although the Beerbelly and Sneaky Shorts aren’t exactly slimming garments — “a chick magnet !”
Wow, we’d never take ours off. Symphony Ball, here we come. E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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