The Origin of SLAMBO

When I was in college in Ohio, I had a close male friend who was on the college wrestling team and also a member of my then boyfriend's Frat. He was a great person but not the sharpest tool in the shed. We had two classes together with the same free time between them. He needed to lift weights for wrestling (he was in the heavyweight range) and "required" a spotter. He asked me to spot him lifting between these two classes. As he was a very enthusiastic person, he encouraged me to lift with him. I did and bulked up pretty fast - my mom was shocked when I came home that summer, all the blousy-type shirts she wanted me to wear didn't fit anymore. He was suitably impressed and said that pretty soon I'd be big enough to take on Rambo and "they" would have to call me "Sambo". "No, wait...[long pause as I watched him think, it was a mostly physical process for him] I know, they'll call you SLAMBO!!" He was so proud of coming up with this nickname and I really liked it too, so I told him if and when I ever got a car, it would be my license plate.

SLAMBO sort of evolved into several different directions...

In my wild and crazy partying days (4-5 nights a week dancing my ass off and beveraging excessively, never going to bed before 3am and having to wake up to bicycle to work - no car at the time - at 6:45am), it became the drink that a bartender created for me at the local basement dancing/dive me and my friends frequented. I don't like the way beer or hard liquor tastes, so this bartender whipped up a special drink for me that tasted nothing like alcohol although the punch it packed was certainly alcoholic. It was a hurricane glass filled 2/3 of the way up with Vodka and White Rum, then the juice (if you can call it juice) from the Maraschino cherry jar 'til just before the edge, topped off with a splash of pineapple juice, and a handful of cherries thrown in for suggestive and tasty measures. The bartender asked me what I wanted to call the bright red drink. I decided on SLAMBOs because I had no car at the time and the name seemed to be extremely appropriate (not to mention the combo of red dye and alcohol was slammin').

Guys who just met me when we were "out and about" always assumed SLAMBO meant something sexual. Hah, as if!!! It didn't help I mostly wore red and black and Spandex (uni-suits and dresses) with big-ass wild hair at the time.

I DJed for a while at the bar/dive and called myself SLAMBO. No spinning of records, mostly juggling CDs in two players to make sure the songs didn't have a space between them and making sure the patrons danced their asses off and got thirsty enough to order multiple drinks.

And that is how SLAMBO came into being. Now it's my blog.