The Challengers: Greg and AJ

The Reward: One US Dollar

The Punishment: None

The Story: One dollar challenges have become an important aspect of our daily lives. Sometimes these one dollar challenges focus on the minor, the trivial, or even the absurd. Other times these bets deal with very serious, far reaching life issues. I think we would all agree that marriage falls into the second category - and that is what this minor challenge deals with.

Years ago our good pal Hulk began dating a wonderful woman named after a character in a time travel movie (or was it a rock and roll movie?). Quite early on in this so called relationship statements were made about it's scope and severity. Lines were drawn in the sand and dollars were thrown down in the name of love.

On one side of that line stood Greg. It was his belief that Hulk would propose before he left to start serving his time in the army. On the other side AJ stood defiantly, sure of the fact that Hulk would not propose before he left to start his service.

With their decisions made all that was left was waiting. Days turned to months, months turned to years, and throughout all this time pretty much everyone knew about this one dollar challenge except for the people that it was based on. Occasionally the challengers would try to help their prediction along through some casual suggestions in everyday conversation. An example:

Greg: So how's Lorraine?
Hulk: She's doing well.
Greg: You guys are getting married aren't you?

Conversely:

AJ: You want to go see a movie tonight?
Hulk: I don't know... Is anything good playing?
AJ: Don't you even fucking think about proposing to Lorraine. You got that!?
Hulk: I heard that "Spider Man" was pretty good.

As Hulk's final Cranstonian summer wound to a close it seemed as if AJ's victory was all but sealed. On the eve of the Hulk's departure we sat him down in a bowling alley to come clean - and to make sure that he didn't secretly propose to Lorraine. AJ and Greg made things as awkward as they could (it almost seemed as if they were getting ready to tell him that his dog died or something) and came clean to Hulk that they had been tracking the results of his relationship for years. Hulk didn't find things nearly as strange as we expected him to - and AJ was declared the winner.

We were thinking of setting things up so that Lorraine found out about this bet when she read about it on the internet. Sadly Hulk told her about it already - but that's ok because things will even out when we show up at her wedding wearing a huge 5 man tuxedo.