The Worst Idea We've Ever Had — The Thursday Table, Episode 0

The Thursday Table — Episode 0

A Dry Wit Clothing Original Series

As told by Patrick “Patch” Donovan, owner of The Side Door.

I've owned bars long enough to know that nothing good ever starts with a grown man announcing he's had a brilliant idea.

Especially when that man is Mick Bennett.

Mick is forty-six, divorced, an extremely successful commercial insurance executive, and living proof that confidence and intelligence aren't necessarily related.

He's also one of my closest friends. I'd deny that under oath.

It was a Thursday evening in October when he walked into my bar wearing the expression of a man who'd just discovered a billion-dollar opportunity.

I'd seen that expression before.

It usually cost somebody money.

But to understand how six otherwise successful adults wound up inventing Dry Wit Clothing, you need to understand the people involved.

And why I kept letting them into my establishment.

The Thursday Table

I met the original five in 2012.

They'd been friends since college, somewhere around 1999, and were celebrating a reunion. Their version of celebrating involved expensive drinks, increasingly exaggerated stories, and a lengthy argument about whether Tommy Sullivan had actually been any good at baseball.

Tommy, naturally, maintained that he'd been exceptional.

Nobody else agreed.

He now owns a successful commercial construction company, employs more than seventy people, and still believes his forty-five-year-old body can do everything it did at twenty.

His orthopedic surgeon probably owns a vacation home thanks to him.

Daniel “Danno” Brooks is the group's financial conscience. He's a CFO who manages enormous corporate budgets but will spend twenty minutes disputing a four-dollar discrepancy on a restaurant bill.

He also maintains a spreadsheet of money Mick has owed him since 2003.

I wish I were kidding.

Lauren Parker, whom everybody calls Lo, owns a crisis public relations firm. Corporations pay her extraordinary amounts of money to explain why their executives aren't quite as stupid as their latest public statements suggest.

She's exceptional at her job.

She's even better at making her friends regret opening their mouths.

Then there's Katherine Miller, or Kat, an emergency department director who's spent more than two decades dealing with genuine emergencies.

As a result, she has absolutely no patience for imaginary ones.

Kat rarely raises her voice. She doesn't need to. One disappointed look from her can make a grown man reconsider his entire personality.

And finally, there's me.

Patrick Donovan. Patch to these idiots.

I'm fifty-three, divorced, and the owner of The Side Door and several other establishments. I built a reasonably successful hospitality business by serving alcohol to people I frequently wish would stop speaking.

Somehow, these five adopted me.

I didn't apply. There was no interview.

I was simply absorbed into the group, like an unsuspecting company being acquired by private equity.

By 2026, they'd claimed the same table in the back of my bar every Thursday for fourteen years.

My staff called it The Thursday Table.

I called it a recurring insurance liability.

A Notebook Full of Evidence

Here's what makes this group particularly irritating.

They're genuinely good at what they do.

Between them, they manage businesses, multimillion-dollar budgets, construction projects, corporate crises, and hospital emergencies.

Put them together at a bar, however, and their collective intelligence drops to a level that concerns me professionally.

Their stories go back twenty-five years.

There's the infamous college apartment blackout of 2001, when Mick forgot to pay the electric bill and Tommy decided the solution was to barbecue the refrigerator's contents on a second-floor wooden balcony.

Kat threatened to call the fire department.

Lo threatened to call the landlord's attorney.

Danno calculated the financial consequences.

Mick went looking for more charcoal.

To this day, I don't understand how these people managed to reach middle age without losing their friendships—or their lives.

And those were the incidents before I met them.

Years ago, my head bartender, Ray, started keeping a notebook of the most ridiculous things customers said or did at The Side Door.

He called it The Evidence.

The Thursday Table eventually earned its own section.

There was the evening Tommy attempted to prove he could still dunk a basketball using one of my hanging light fixtures.

He couldn't.

The light fixture never recovered, and neither did his shoulder.

Mick once argued with a machine for twenty minutes because it wouldn't play his favorite song.

It was an ATM.

Danno once requested an itemized breakdown of a shared appetizer because he believed he'd eaten less than everyone else.

Lo left a quarter on the table to compensate him.

Kat has repeatedly informed Tommy that she isn't accepting new patients.

I kept that notebook partly because it was entertaining and partly because I thought it might someday be useful in court.

I had no idea it would become the foundation of a clothing company.

The Worst Idea

That particular Thursday started normally enough.

Tommy was complaining about losing a neighborhood barbecue competition to a man named Gary. Danno was reviewing something on his phone that was undoubtedly more important to him than it was to anyone else. Lo had spent the afternoon handling a corporate disaster.

Kat arrived late, ordered a tequila soda, and made it clear she had no interest in managing anybody else's problems.

And Mick was unusually quiet.

That should have worried us.

The conversation eventually turned to an old college incident, then another, and before long everyone was arguing about things that had happened decades earlier.

I brought out Ray's notebook.

For the next twenty minutes, six supposedly accomplished adults laughed their way through years of documented stupidity.

Tommy disputed several entries.

Danno questioned their accuracy.

Lo wondered whether the notebook created legal exposure.

Kat laughed so hard at one story that she nearly spilled her drink.

Then Mick stopped reading.

He had that look again.

“Hear me out.”

I considered closing early.

His proposal was simple: take the best lines from the notebook, put them on T-shirts, and sell them to people who appreciated sarcasm and questionable judgment.

Danno immediately started calculating printing costs and potential profit margins.

Tommy loved the idea, largely because he already owned an unreasonable number of shirts advertising fictional organizations.

Lo called it a business model built on twenty-five years of emotional immaturity.

Kat suggested we might qualify for some kind of government assistance.

I thought it was ridiculous.

But the longer they argued, the more I began to see the appeal.

These people had spent their entire adult lives building successful careers while finding increasingly creative ways to embarrass themselves.

And there was something strangely comforting about it.

When my divorce went through, they showed up at the bar, pulled out a chair, bought me a drink, and didn't ask unnecessary questions.

Mick even kept his mouth shut for almost four minutes.

It was one of the nicest things anybody had done for me in years.

So maybe the shirts weren't really about the jokes.

Maybe they were about the friendships behind them.

I wasn't ready to admit that, of course.

Giving It a Name

Naming the company was an ordeal.

Mick suggested names that sounded like expensive consulting firms.

Tommy wanted something involving fire.

Danno wanted to conduct market research.

I suggested Please Leave.

Nobody appreciated my contribution.

Finally, Lo had enough.

She pointed out that we didn't need something clever. We needed something that described the way we talked.

Dry humor. Sarcasm. The ability to deliver a devastating insult without changing facial expressions.

She looked at the notebook.

“Dry Wit.”

For once, nobody had an objection.

Mick repeated it a few times.

Danno admitted it was marketable.

Tommy liked that it would fit on a shirt.

Kat just shook her head.

“Congratulations. You've just given five idiots a business plan.”

And that was that.

No inspirational speeches. No brilliant entrepreneurial revelation.

Just six middle-aged friends realizing they might have discovered a productive use for decades of bad decisions.

The First Design

The logo took another forty minutes.

Mick wanted sophistication. Tommy wanted flames. Danno wanted something inexpensive to print.

Kat wanted everyone to go home.

Lo finally grabbed a cocktail napkin and sketched a small face that looked thoroughly unimpressed with the world.

It didn't smile.

It didn't need to.

I'd seen that expression hundreds of times across my bar, usually right after somebody suggested splitting the check equally.

Nobody hated it.

Which, for this group, was unanimous approval.

I slipped the napkin into Ray's notebook before someone spilled a drink on it.

Mick started checking domain names.

Danno opened a spreadsheet.

Tommy offered to model the shirts, a proposal everyone immediately rejected.

Lo volunteered to supervise anything Mick intended to write publicly.

Kat asked whether participation in the company qualified as community service.

I watched them for a while.

Six successful adults. Twenty-five years of friendship. Hundreds of terrible decisions.

And now they wanted to turn those decisions into a business.

After everyone left, I opened Ray's notebook and added one final entry:

October 2026. Six otherwise competent adults decide to turn twenty-five years of embarrassing behavior into a clothing company. Financial exposure unknown. Judgment questionable. No injuries reported. Yet.

I closed the notebook, finished my whiskey, and went upstairs.

For the first time in years, I was actually looking forward to whatever terrible idea they'd come up with next.

And that, as far as I can tell, is how Dry Wit Clothing began.

Not with a business plan.

Just twenty-five years of friendship, a notebook full of evidence, and six people who really should have known better.

---

Some Stories Are Better Worn

The first design was nothing more than a name and a face that looked like it had heard quite enough.

It was the only thing we could all agree on.

See the Dry Wit Logo Shirt

The Thursday Table is a fictional comedy series from Dry Wit Clothing. Its characters, events, and founding story are fictional.