[IDareYouTo!]

(FICTIONAL, of course. Forgot to post it.)

The trouble with having a lot of kids, you see, is that it leaves you
badly outnumbered sometimes!

My name is Ann, Annette Rebecca Thayer if you want the full title,
and I am mother of no less than four lovely daughters, who have in
the course of time made me, ready or not, a grandmother of several
teenagers. I am the proud grandmother of no less than six teen
grandkids. Only my youngest is not yet a mother.

Now, the thing is that I had my first kids, the twins, when I was still
back in high school. I most emphatically do not recommend that!
It made their father and my life a nightmare, but we did manage to
finish school, and my dear departed husband actually became a very
successful businessman on top of that. By the time he left us (lung
cancer), we had enough money in the bank to cover all our needs
and then some, we’re not super-rich but we don’t have to work if we
don’t want to.

Anyway, a while back my daughters and I decided to go on a girls
only vacation, just my four daughters and me. All four of my girls
are divorced, so their ex’s had the kids while the five of us decided
to spend a week together having fun and reconnecting. We opted
to go to a little beachfront resort, on an island off the coast of Mexico,
where we rented a bungalow and prepared to spend two weeks just
relaxing and having fun.

We were on the first afternoon that we arrived when the mischief
got started. You see, my daughters and I had lubricated our sense
of fun with a little tequila earlier in the day, none of us were drunk
but I think we were all just a little tipsy. Furthermore, mother nature
was feeling uncooperative, a tropical storm system out at sea had
managed to bring rare rains to the resort island, something that was
almost never a problem there. So the five of us were indoors in our
bungalow, a little bit tipsy and just a bit bored. The twins, Kate and
Rebecca, were playing cards, Melissa and I were watching TV,
and Janet was reading a magazine.

“Remember the time we all played strip poker with the guys over
at Mike’s birthday party?” Rebecca happened to ask, and Jan giggled
and blushed.

“Becky! Mom is sitting right there!”

“So what?” Rebecca replied. “I’m 38 years old and it was a long time
ago! I’ll bet Mom isn’t even shocked.”

Shocked? No. Curious, yes.

“Was this Mike’s infamous birthday party when he turned 16?” I asked,
referring to my daughter’s then-boyfriend. Stories had circulated about
that for years.

“Yeah,” Janet said, apparently reassured by my calm reaction, “the twins
and Becky here all played strip poker there with about a dozen other teens,
or so I always heard. It’s not like I was there, after all!”

“You were only six at the time, kid,” Rebecca laughed. “You’re lucky we
told you about it later.”

“You’re not upset?” Janet asked me. At 28, Janet was the baby of the four,
and could most recently remember when I was still the strict, stern mother to
her. The others were more used to my relaxed side, that they’d experienced
after they grew up.

“After all these years?! Not a bit of it,” I told my youngest. “Oh, I’d have
lowered the boom on them if I found out the time, but it’s water under the
bridge now. I’m 54 years old and strip poker isn’t a shock to me!”

“Ever play it yourself, Mom?” Kate asked me as she dealt cards for her and
her identical twin’s next round.

“Maybe once or twice,” I admitted.

That seemed to shock my daughters no little, which made me want to
laugh. I guess most kids think their parents were always boring and strict
all the time, finding out otherwise can be a surprise.

Now, the conversation would probably have turned to other things, but
for Melissa, my 34 year old. Having mostly kept quite during this whole
discussion up until this point, she suddenly said, “When was the last time
you played, Mom?”

Now that question put me off my stride a little, because I didn’t really
want to answer it. It’s one thing to admit to your adult daughters that you
had played strip poker in the distant past, back when the dinosaurs roamed
the Earth and Gerald Ford was President. It’s another to admit you’d done
it a little more recently. Still, I either had to lie or answer with the truth, and
I hate to lie to my daughters.

“Well...the last time was...” I felt myself blush as I continued...”well, six
months ago.”

Now my daughters were definitely shocked! They demanded to know the
details, which I kept as scanty as I could. What it amounted to was that my
friends and I from college had played strip poker during our reunion six
months before.

“No, I didn’t end up naked, Rebecca!” I said, trying to sound stern. “What a
question to ask you own mother!”

“So how close did you get?” Janet asked, eyes dancing, enjoying my blush
and the whole situation.

“I lost my shoes and socks and shirt, and that’s all,” I told them. “Satisfied?”

“Wanna play now?” Kate asked us. “Anybody?”

“Are you kidding?!” Melissa replied. “Why?”

Kate shrugged. “I’m bored, it might liven things up. Come on, ladies, I dare
you all! Strip poker, here and now!”

To my surprise, the idea seemed to float in the air, half accepted. As
I look back I realize it was the combination of the situation, the boredom,
and the tequila at work.

“What’s the excitement?” Jan asked. “We’re all girls here.”

“I have an idea,” Rebecca said, “we could change the rules a little.”

“What did you have in mind?” Melissa asked her older sister.

“Let’s see...how about each round, everybody BUT the winner has
to take off at least one item, the winner gets to put something back
on, and also gets to make the lower scorer do a dare, you know, like
truth or dare? The low scorer either does the dare or loses another
item!”

“Sounds interesting,” Melissa said with a shrug. Then she smiled
an evil smile and added, “but I’ll go you one better: we play until
one lady is naked, and she has go naked the rest of the vacation!”

“What?!”
“Are you serious?!”
“I don’t know-“

“Come on,” Melissa said. “Nudity is allowed down here, after all,
right out in public, it’s just that we never did it on our earlier trips!

“You mean the big loser can’t put anything on at ALL until the end
of the two weeks?!” I said. “I can’t believe you’d even suggest that!”

“Oh, come on, Mom,” Melissa said. “It’s no big deal down here!”

“What else?” Janet asked.

“What do you mean, what else?” Melissa demanded. “Isn’t that
enough?!”

“Not if we’re really wanting something exciting,” Janet replied.
“l.ike you said, public nudity at the resort is no big deal, after a
couple of days our big loser would be used to it anyway. We
need a little something else on top of that, if we want to have an
exciting game!”

“What did you have in mind, Squirt?” Kate asked her sister.

Janet smiled, and then said, “How about the big loser has to be the
slave of the winners all through the vacation? She not only has to
go naked, but she has to wait on the others hand and foot, obey
all their orders, pretty much be their slave! Like those slave bets
we used to make when we were kids, remember?”

“Those lasted an hour or two,” Kate commented dryly. “Not two
weeks! And we were living at home and couldn’t get into much
trouble anyway then. But...I’m game if you are, Jan.”

To my amazement, I heard myself agreeing to the terms, I guess I
was a little tipsier than I had realized, or just a lot more bored.
The last one who had to be coaxed into joining us was Becky,
who protested that she wasn’t that good at cards. None of us
took that seriously, she’s cutthroat, but she’s also probably the
most ‘timid’ of the four girls sometimes, too.

Anyway, the five of us gathered around the card table, and I
dealt the first hand.

TO BE CONTINUED...