Aloha Friday at the Obama White House

Yeah, I know what you’re asking yourself right now: “what is ‘Aloha Friday,’ and what does it have to do with a dunking booth on the White House lawn?” Well, as Break Out The Oreos‘ resident Hawaii-expert (and I do use that title very, very loosely), I can inform our inquisitive readership that Aloha Friday is a practice that began in the 1960s in which businesses would allow and even encourage their employees to wear comfortable, loose-fitting aloha shirts (that’s “Hawaiian shirts” for those of you who remain confused) instead of the confining, more professional outfits that they wore on the other four days of the week. Yes, that’s right, America—Hawaii business owners are directly responsible for the now-mainstream Casual Friday, that weekly event in which middle-aged Americans try to figure how the heck their younger co-workers are able to get their jeans to sit so low.

But you didn’t really care that much about the intricacies of daily culture in Hawaii, did you? You just wanted to know about the dunking booth.

The booth played a central, highly-entertaining role in Friday’s lu’au-themed Congressional picnic on the White House lawn. It featured (on a spectrum of actual “Hawaiian-ness”) hula hoops and plastic lei (very low), grass shacks (medium), and the cooking of Alan Wong (bingbingbingbingbing!). Receiving most of the afternoon’s attention, of course, the dunking booth, occupied by a rotating lineup of the President’s senior staff:

But seriously, we didn’t come to see a cheery, amiable guy like Robert Gibbs get dunked. Where is Rahm Emanuel, and why isn’t he in the booth, yet? Ah, there he is, being dragged tooth-and-nail to the edge of the water, his natural habitat. Now who’s going to risk their life by hitting the bullseye?

To be fair, Rahm Emanuel probably would have preferred to have been brutally waterboarded in a room full of his enemies rather than playfully dunked on a lawn full of his coworkers—at least in the first case he would be able to take some of them with him. So let’s just stop laughing now and let him get back to the scarily-good job that he’s been doing. You know, before he changes his mind about allowing survivors.

Devon Grandy is a writer, blogger, humorist, filmmaker, and musician. The creator and Editor-in-Chief of Break Out The Oreos, Devon is chiefly responsible for the alternatingly mind-numbing and glee-inspiring process of transforming his brainchild into a "for real" web magazine. Read more.