San Francisco! With The Fog! And The Taxis! And The Streetcars! And The One-Ways! Give Me The Keys Before I Scratch Your Not-On-The-Road Eyes Out!
or
That New Chrysler Sedan Looks Like An Eighty-Four Year Old Man And Drives Like A Ninety-Two Year Old Woman. In The Bad Way.
1) Northern California vacation in
this vein; it's an annual retreat that R's non-profit club indulges in once a year. Strangely enough the group always manages to get reservations in a "resort spa" so the women can indulge the apparently club-requisite Eighty Dollar Pedicure addiction and I can pack all of my gym clothes and my mp3 player and two pairs of sneakers and then slink by the gym on my way to the open bar hospitality suite. It's a generally good time. Lots of buffet chicken. Lots of Baileys and decaf during the slide show. Lots of giddy middle-aged men duct taping other peoples' doors closed. Overall I think we're lucky that the SWAT team wasn't called.
2) So "wine tasting"? Yeah, let's just go ahead and call that "drinking all day, starting at nine-thirty". Jesus. I found it increasingly entertaining to think of new ways to describe the wine in taste question. (I'm sure that this development was unrelated to the wine imbibement itself in the same way that I'm sure that the waiter's shirt at dinner was a funny enough shade of mauve to cry over. Which is to say, not at all sure.) For example, I remember gazing around pensively, swirling my glass and declaring the wine within to be "clammy", "squishy", "barkish", "tiger-like", "very Gatsby", "hard to be offended by", "standoffish" and "adorable". I've left out the ones that don't make any sense.
3) One of the other women paid me a compliment one night at dinner: "You're so young but you really carry yourself well. You blend in nicely with what could be an intimidating group."
That was nice.
I'm betting that she hadn't seen me at lunch earlier when I had three pieces of "RED BLAST" Hubba Bubba in my mouth and I was drawing the "Chicken Dragon Of Doom Complete With Eggs Of Doom" in crayon on my tablecloth. I clean up good.
