Great news was the end of poverty and achieving world peace. So, too, was winning the lottery, sleeping with Brad Pitt, and a new burrito option at Taco Bell. I could think of a dozen or so adjectives to describe a twenty-eight-year-old man coaxing his mother to catch the red-eye to hold his hand while accessing exam results. Great was not one of them. Throw in the casserole and it was downright deviant.

Nonetheless, I was grateful to our geeky Oedipus for providing us with a diversion. James took a long sip of his beer before asking the million-dollar question: “Do you guys think he and his mom are going to sleep in the same bed?”

“Definitely,” Matthew answered with certainty.

“I bet they’re spooning right now,” Kevin added.

In the end, however, Brian may have been the smart one. The rest of us could have been arrested on charges of bad conversation for the ensuing hours.

“Do you think I failed?” and “I know I failed” miraculously didn’t get old. Not for us, at least. But it did for the seventy-year-old man who’d had ten too many gin martinis sitting on the bar stool next to us: “Can’t you talk about shumthing elsh?” Whatever he was asking, the answer was no. Anyway, why was he drinking martinis at an Irish pub?

We hopped from bar to bar, muttering the same exact words and ending up at City Tavern—“Ben Franklin drank here!” Where didn’t old Benny F tie one on? Based on the little plaques outside of every bar in Old City, the guy—and his esteemed colleagues—spent more time boozing than drafting the Constitution. The whole thing lent credence to my theory that the Constitution framers were really just a bunch of philandering drunks who realized that drafting a “constitution” was a pretty good rap that would get them laid. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Independence Hall had been a brothel. It was directly across the street from the City Tavern.

Inside was a smorgasbord of colonial fun. Butter churners. Book-binders. Darners. You name it, they were there peddling their wares. I was certain there was a secret trapdoor, to the left of butter-churning Betty and right behind darning Dick, where sadomasochistic gimps in bonnets whipped each other for some good old-fashioned eighteenth-century fun. Wrong century, but Medieval Roy would’ve enjoyed it nevertheless.

We careened past the toothy pack of fiddling fifers on our way to the back, where a roaring fire roasted ill-fated wenches-cum-waitresses in thick hoop skirts. We turned down the $17.89 “Commemorative Constitutional Dinner,” choosing mugs of “George Washington Woodchuck Cider” and “James Madison Madeira” instead. Mine tasted like petrified skunk.

“I mean, really, what are the chances that any of us failed,” I asked for the fiftieth time.