I don't think it's any real surprise that Glitterati likes to party.
Hey, who doesn't?
(That is, I assume if you are reading this blog - you like to party. I could be wrong, however. Perhaps you read this blog, and shake your head, and say "Now that is a shame...nice young lady like that...wasting away her life to the drink." But then, you'd x out the screen and head back to your picture book of cats, or hand-crafting your own plain yogurt [because what's available in health food stores is just so full of chemicals these days....] and probably hate me anyway for using the pseudonym Glitterati ("Gaudy...tasteless...ostentatious!"), in which case, I probably would not want to party with you. So that's OK.)
(I digress.)
In the roller coaster that was my twenties, there are a few moments that stand out. They shouldn't, because they involved copious amounts of...shall we say...grape juice. Very expensive grape juice that is only sold in adult stores and requires identification to purchase. Shall we say.
To begin with - my twenty first birthday. To this day, my parents express disdain that they were not invited to any of the events involving my twenty first. I allowed them to drive out to my college to visit me and take me to lunch, where I ordered my first legal alcoholic beverage (AHEM), and then kissed them merrily and sent them on their way so that the real party could begin.
Consequently, my parents are invited to and attending my 30th birthday party. And the after-party. Which they are also welcome to attend. But probably won't. And will probably claim that they weren't invited.
Because I am a May baby, my twenty first fell squarely in the middle of the year and thus in the middle of all of my friends in terms of legality. Half of them were still waiting for their twenty first, the other half had already rung in the good news. So we divided my birthday into two major events: the night BEFORE my birthday (house party) and the night OF my birthday (at a bar). I thought it was a particularly brilliant way of dealing with things, mostly because it meant I got to have two parties, and two parties are almost always better than one.
The second event is a particularly fond memory for me because it was the last time that myself and two of my very best friends, Snickers and Princess, were all in the same room together. Since that time, nine years ago, our lives have taken us to 8 different states (collectively), and none of them at the same time. In fact, the first time we will all be together again is next month, at Snicker's bachelorette party in the Hamptons (more on that later).
Anyhoodle, Snickers and Princess took it upon themselves to create an after-party. For, you know, when the bars closed. No one wants to go home, right?! But to ensure that we would at least have a decent crowd, they decided to invite...everybody. In the bar. And by everybody, I mean - all of the menfolk. They flirted their way from boy group to boy group, slyly slipping out my address and hinting that they would be the only boys invited to the party. By last call, both girls were ushering me hurriedly out of the bar and into a cab so as not to miss my own after-party.
I thought they were joking.
Until car after car of menfolk began to pull up to the house.
Being the completely classy and utterly mature young women we were at that time (us being 21 and all), we turned off all of the lights and huddled by the front window and laughed in hysterical gasping fits every time a carload of very confused menfolk pulled up. This game could have gone on for hours, but after awhile they seem to catch on that there were no lights on in the house and that they'd been duped.
My friends are so awesome.
College was full of notable moments. And therefore doesn't really count in the list of epic party moments. And so, I fast-forward to grad school.
In Florida, where I went to grad school, you could buy beer and wine practically anywhere. Rite Aid sells it. Gas stations sell it. I'm sure Gymboree Tots sells it. You want liquor? You gotta find an ABC store (Alcohol Board of Creeps or something like that), wait until it's open (for a fleeting number of hours on certain days of the week) for your vodka or gin fix(zz) (see what I did there?!). But beer and wine? Hell, you could set up a card table outside of your house and sell individual bottles of beer and call yourself a distributor. So it seems.
One night, on the way home from the bar after last-call, it was decided that what was imminently needed was more beer. To cap off the night. Alas, the only thing open for miles was a creepily-lit gas station. Hedging our bets, our DD (I assume we had one - we were always very responsible in Florida after discovering it's practically DUI capital of the east coast) pulled into the parking lot, and myself and my old roommate tumbled out and attempted to enter the building part of the station. The door was locked. The attendant was standing behind one of those flippy window things, were you can lay your money in a drawer and push it shut, and then she can pull it from the other end to retrieve your money without having to be exposed to you or any other imminent danger.
"Can we buy beer?" we asked, knowing full well that we could.
"Sure, but I only have 24-pack. Bottles"
"OK, we'll take it."
"It does not fit through the safety window."
Conundrum. We could see the beer, tantalizingly, on the other side of the window. Also - we were on a time crunch because we'd ordered pizza and cockily believed we could get home, with beer, before Dominoes could deliver. If we debated too long, we'd head home not only beerless but possibly miss the pizza as well. Double failure.
"OK, well, can you hand them to us one at a time?"
The attendant was Not Pleased. I can't imagine why.
In the end, she forced us to fork over the money first (in cash), and then she made a great show of pulling each bottle carefully out of the 24-pack and lining them up on the counter. She then carefully folded the cardboard box they came in, and send that through the window first. When we finally pulled the wretched, torn, shredded piece of cardboard through the safety window she then began handing us the beers. One at a time. Verrrry carefully.
Around this time, a gentleman on a bicycle came up behind us. He looked at us and the beers and sighed, exasperatedly. Apparently we were interrupting his cigarette jones with our charade. But we were paying customers! He made audible signs to indicate how much we were ruining his life.
Also, around this time, Napoleon Dynamite was still a very notable, and quotable, pop-culture reference. And, seeking to make the gentleman perhaps laugh and enjoy his brief moment in time in our company, I eyed up his bike as we were handing off the beer bottles like batons in a very important relay, and said:
"Duuuuuuuuuuude, you got pegs?! Luckeeeeyyyyyyyyy!"
He did not find this amusing.
But we did.
Very much.
Which he found even further not-amusing.
It is a known fact that there is nothing funnier than a drunk person - but only to another drunk person. We made four enemies that night: the gas station attendant, the guy on the bike, our DD (my now-ex-boyfriend), and later the Dominoes pizza guy who we couldn't tip because we'd given up all of our cash to the aforementioned pissed-off gas station attendant.
Part II to come soon.
Hey, who doesn't?
(That is, I assume if you are reading this blog - you like to party. I could be wrong, however. Perhaps you read this blog, and shake your head, and say "Now that is a shame...nice young lady like that...wasting away her life to the drink." But then, you'd x out the screen and head back to your picture book of cats, or hand-crafting your own plain yogurt [because what's available in health food stores is just so full of chemicals these days....] and probably hate me anyway for using the pseudonym Glitterati ("Gaudy...tasteless...ostentatious!"), in which case, I probably would not want to party with you. So that's OK.)
(I digress.)
In the roller coaster that was my twenties, there are a few moments that stand out. They shouldn't, because they involved copious amounts of...shall we say...grape juice. Very expensive grape juice that is only sold in adult stores and requires identification to purchase. Shall we say.
To begin with - my twenty first birthday. To this day, my parents express disdain that they were not invited to any of the events involving my twenty first. I allowed them to drive out to my college to visit me and take me to lunch, where I ordered my first legal alcoholic beverage (AHEM), and then kissed them merrily and sent them on their way so that the real party could begin.
Consequently, my parents are invited to and attending my 30th birthday party. And the after-party. Which they are also welcome to attend. But probably won't. And will probably claim that they weren't invited.
Because I am a May baby, my twenty first fell squarely in the middle of the year and thus in the middle of all of my friends in terms of legality. Half of them were still waiting for their twenty first, the other half had already rung in the good news. So we divided my birthday into two major events: the night BEFORE my birthday (house party) and the night OF my birthday (at a bar). I thought it was a particularly brilliant way of dealing with things, mostly because it meant I got to have two parties, and two parties are almost always better than one.
The second event is a particularly fond memory for me because it was the last time that myself and two of my very best friends, Snickers and Princess, were all in the same room together. Since that time, nine years ago, our lives have taken us to 8 different states (collectively), and none of them at the same time. In fact, the first time we will all be together again is next month, at Snicker's bachelorette party in the Hamptons (more on that later).
Anyhoodle, Snickers and Princess took it upon themselves to create an after-party. For, you know, when the bars closed. No one wants to go home, right?! But to ensure that we would at least have a decent crowd, they decided to invite...everybody. In the bar. And by everybody, I mean - all of the menfolk. They flirted their way from boy group to boy group, slyly slipping out my address and hinting that they would be the only boys invited to the party. By last call, both girls were ushering me hurriedly out of the bar and into a cab so as not to miss my own after-party.
I thought they were joking.
Until car after car of menfolk began to pull up to the house.
Being the completely classy and utterly mature young women we were at that time (us being 21 and all), we turned off all of the lights and huddled by the front window and laughed in hysterical gasping fits every time a carload of very confused menfolk pulled up. This game could have gone on for hours, but after awhile they seem to catch on that there were no lights on in the house and that they'd been duped.
My friends are so awesome.
College was full of notable moments. And therefore doesn't really count in the list of epic party moments. And so, I fast-forward to grad school.
In Florida, where I went to grad school, you could buy beer and wine practically anywhere. Rite Aid sells it. Gas stations sell it. I'm sure Gymboree Tots sells it. You want liquor? You gotta find an ABC store (Alcohol Board of Creeps or something like that), wait until it's open (for a fleeting number of hours on certain days of the week) for your vodka or gin fix(zz) (see what I did there?!). But beer and wine? Hell, you could set up a card table outside of your house and sell individual bottles of beer and call yourself a distributor. So it seems.
One night, on the way home from the bar after last-call, it was decided that what was imminently needed was more beer. To cap off the night. Alas, the only thing open for miles was a creepily-lit gas station. Hedging our bets, our DD (I assume we had one - we were always very responsible in Florida after discovering it's practically DUI capital of the east coast) pulled into the parking lot, and myself and my old roommate tumbled out and attempted to enter the building part of the station. The door was locked. The attendant was standing behind one of those flippy window things, were you can lay your money in a drawer and push it shut, and then she can pull it from the other end to retrieve your money without having to be exposed to you or any other imminent danger.
"Can we buy beer?" we asked, knowing full well that we could.
"Sure, but I only have 24-pack. Bottles"
"OK, we'll take it."
"It does not fit through the safety window."
Conundrum. We could see the beer, tantalizingly, on the other side of the window. Also - we were on a time crunch because we'd ordered pizza and cockily believed we could get home, with beer, before Dominoes could deliver. If we debated too long, we'd head home not only beerless but possibly miss the pizza as well. Double failure.
"OK, well, can you hand them to us one at a time?"
The attendant was Not Pleased. I can't imagine why.
In the end, she forced us to fork over the money first (in cash), and then she made a great show of pulling each bottle carefully out of the 24-pack and lining them up on the counter. She then carefully folded the cardboard box they came in, and send that through the window first. When we finally pulled the wretched, torn, shredded piece of cardboard through the safety window she then began handing us the beers. One at a time. Verrrry carefully.
Around this time, a gentleman on a bicycle came up behind us. He looked at us and the beers and sighed, exasperatedly. Apparently we were interrupting his cigarette jones with our charade. But we were paying customers! He made audible signs to indicate how much we were ruining his life.
Also, around this time, Napoleon Dynamite was still a very notable, and quotable, pop-culture reference. And, seeking to make the gentleman perhaps laugh and enjoy his brief moment in time in our company, I eyed up his bike as we were handing off the beer bottles like batons in a very important relay, and said:
"Duuuuuuuuuuude, you got pegs?! Luckeeeeyyyyyyyyy!"
He did not find this amusing.
But we did.
Very much.
Which he found even further not-amusing.
It is a known fact that there is nothing funnier than a drunk person - but only to another drunk person. We made four enemies that night: the gas station attendant, the guy on the bike, our DD (my now-ex-boyfriend), and later the Dominoes pizza guy who we couldn't tip because we'd given up all of our cash to the aforementioned pissed-off gas station attendant.
Part II to come soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment