Inaugural M&M home game

Never play poker with a guy named Doc, they say, so maybe our first mistake was inviting Rayo “Doc” Inouye to our little card game at Casa M&M on Friday night.

Rayo, a retired copy desk chief at the Seattle Times, is now a semipro poker player whose identity as Doc is so ingrained in local card rooms that, as we laughed about again the other night, he was once called upon to perform CPR at a table-side medical emergency. He’s a fun guy to have in a home game, full of stories about the old days in newspapers and gambling halls.

It was about time that Michelle and I reciprocated by inviting some journo friends over for a game here. We’ve been mooching off pals like P-I managing editor David McCumber and Seattle Timesers Jim Simon and Jack Broom for years -- in fact I played with Jack and Rayo in a regular game 20 years ago -- and when we lived in LA we had a semi-regular game that always seemed to be at the home of our friends Donna Wares and Ed Humes, never at ours. Some kind of Matassalosi aversion to cleaning, I suspect.

This time Broom, Simon, Rayo, McCumber and former P-I sports editor Nick Rousso all came out to West Seattle -- and everyone brought something to eat or drink, including some splendid salmon and delicious salami under McCumber's arm. It was quite the party.

Also a great seven-handed poker game. Michelle, unsurprisingly, drank the other six of us grizzled old-school reporter/editor types under the table and took our money too. My kind of chick.

Doc made it through the night without being called upon to practice medicine. But his poker skills were scalpel-sharp; he was the game’s biggest winner.

We’re hoping to make it a regular M&M event, even if that means we have to tidy up every few weeks.