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First, they don't tell you it takes pleading. Come on, Blondie, shouts the stout man into the microphone as he points to the middle of the crowd. Come up and show your boyfriend what you got! Some woman you hadn't noticed shakes her head, folds her arms. No way in hell. Whiskey labels are branded into driftwood. Beer and sand stick to the floor. The walls are beams and open air. Plastic curtains are rolled up, their strings wafting inward from the Atlantic. Inside is out, and that, for you, is the best part about a wet T-shirt contest in Key West.
The place is throbbing with the kind of people you'd find at a college party that you would not, yourself, attend. They have filled themselves with liquor, now sweat it out of their pores and into the Floridian mid- night-but that's not the issue. You too have invested eight dollars in a plastic cup of 190 Octane, a mix of orange slushie and grain alcohol potent enough to tank you for the rest of the evening.
The issue: they, the eighty or so standing before the stage awaiting the show, are all extroversion and impulse, riding waves of euphoria, squealing and shouting shit that your Women's Studies professor has you mentally critiquing. Bring on the bitches, says a skinny blonde, and because she's hating on her fellow woman, you then think, Bitch. The irony throws you into reverse. Rethink, rehash, what just happened there? But this is not a scene for the pensive. That's one thing they don't even have to tell you about a wet T-shirt contest.
Your friends know better than to overthink. Fifteen minutes ago, the two of them disappeared, hand-in-hand, behind the stage. They are two of only four contestants who said yes and will now vie for prize money and free tequila.
But women don't really do this for the cash or the booze.
"Let's do it," said your wild, dark-haired friend. We'll call her Deb.
"I'll do it if you do it," said your friend who loves to follow in Deb's footsteps. The other friend is blond. We'll call her Alexa. These are good women. People back at college also say that these women "know how to...