Axiom: If you're sober enough to be troubled by the cold discomfort of the bathroom floor, it's probably safe to go to bed.
Rewind:
It's nice to hear that my favorite bar owner has missed me, since I'm neither a frequent visitor nor a copious consumer, so therefore professionally unmemorable.
It's good to see the bald dude, but it doesn't require more than a few moments. However, quick-minded entertaining people who are free of the aaaaahhhctor double blade of ego and insecurity can keep me occupied for hours.
"Let's do vodka shots," says W., ever friendly and charming. Okay. She brings them, accompanied by sugar-coated lemons.
Do NOT let me have another of these.
"No, just one. Salud!"
Drink the vodka. Bite the lemon. Yummy. It won't hit 'til later, the feeling of having consumed an alcoholic beverage. But the notion of invincibility, as though I can drink as if I were 6'2" and 220 lbs. is instantaneous. I have much more fun than I bargained for, listening to the jukebox, drinking tiny Miller Lites and losing at pool. I restrain myself from biting W.'s tender neck, as her fiancee is present. I content myself with running one fingernail along it. I only came in for a beer.
Rewind:
I plunk down on a barstool, one eye on baseball and one on the new beertender. His name is Mike. He gives me the bad news about the Ravens game. It's been a weird weekend. I need this beer.
Rewind:
"Cybele? I'm not coming in on Monday, after all. I'm coming in tonight."
Really? What time, do you think?
"Well, like, now."
Come on, then. Young Evan will lurk in my basement until I clear the guestroom. Hilby and Martin won't arrive until Friday anyway.
Axiom: If you park your car somewhere other than where you usually park it, it will be dark when you go to look for it.
Rewind:
Larry's reassuring presence keeps me from parking lot panic. The rain has caused large-scale adjustments in our parking patterns.
"Is that it?"
No, we're looking for dark green. Right. On an unlit lot.
"Oh, a Cherokee-type. I thought we were looking for a JEEP Jeep."
Yeah. And we would be, if the Jeep were mine. But it's not, so here we are on a black and crowded waterlogged lot, looking for the BoringMobile.
Rewind:
I am incognito, out of makeup, in mufti. I order coffee and drink it from an aluminum travel mug. I make a call on my cell phone. I refrain from making faces at patrons. I talk to Sandy as she braids my hair. All of this is so strange to me. I keep waiting for someone to call me out: "HEY! Aren't you that mime?" No one does.
Rewind:
"This group of high school students arrived and started singing at the Globe stage."
So?
"Well, they apparantly had called the entertainment director, asked if they could perform, been told 'No' and then showed up anyway."
They crashed the Globe?
"Yeah, they did. 'No one else is performing here right now', they said."
They crashed the Globe. Brilliant.
Rewind:
I am greeted by cheers and congratulations. People thank me for a good laugh, a good story. I am the village hero of the moment. I'm embarassed, as I was ashamed to have lost my temper. And yet, when the collective loveliness of the moccasin booth stands to applaud, I take a bow.
Rewind:
"Oh, it was mad, people being taken away in cuffs and everything."
"They arrived drunk. Justin found beer cans on the parking lot."
"Did you hear about the girls mud wrestling?"
No.
"Well, after they pushed over the privy..."
What?
"Yeah, it's from a movie, I never saw it, but....anyway, they push over the privy with some guy in it, I think they knew him..."
Holy shit.
"Exactly, and these girls went through the hole that was made in the privy wall to the area behind the joust, you know?"
Idiots. And then they start...
"Right, wrestling in the mud, throwing it at each other, except it wasn't mud."
Holy shit.
"Yep. They were flinging horse poo."
Axiom: When there is an Us vs. Them mentality, heroism is defined by one of Us getting some of our own back from Them.
Rewind:
It's been raining on and off all day, mostly on. Patrons have arrived anyhow, some few intrepids willing to drip and slog. That Girl and I have been dashing colorfully from shop to shop and blowing bubbles through our fingers. We carry buckets and rags, and we pause between booths, deciding where to go next. Suddenly, a loud voice roars in my ear, frightening a scream from me. That Girl, startled, looks at someone behind me. I turn. A young man in a striped shirt is dodging away.
Shocked silence falls on this sector of the village. I feel expectation in the air. Will Mimi let this pass? She will not. She must not.
I turn to face my attacker, nearly blind with indignation, and douse him with the contents of my bubble bucket. Still furious, I stalk away to wild cheering from the booth workers.
Rewind:
Ugh. It's raining. I roll over, wrapping myself in the covers before flinging them back to face the world. I have done this before. We can do this again. We will manage to be bright spots of color against the grey drab. I don't even mind getting my feet wet.
It's wet socks I can't stand.
Fast forward:
Early Monday morning, I look at myself in the mirror.
Axiom: No matter what sensible, sober, hairdo protective reason you had for doing it the night before, it still feels incredibly stupid to wake with a pair of pantyhose tied to your head.
(Windy; The Association)
7 comments:
A few comments:
A hangover (the nausea and bad taste in the mouth part) is caused by sugar. If you drink sweet drinks or eat something sugary while drunk, you'll regret it the following morning. This is why I tend to favor scotch, neat.
The rain kept me away this weekend, and next weekend I have to work... dammit. But I would have been cheering as well had I seen you dousing the lout. Too bad you couldn't have made him "mud wrestle".
Should the opportunity ever arise, where I find myself in your presence and you're drinking more than a small mime should, I'll challenge you to a game of pool (I'm pretty awful at it) and help you find your car. Or be your designated driver, depending on the vodka shots.
Oh, and going back to hangovers: few things make me feel ill the next morning quite like a Miller Lite. Please, my friend: drink beer, not carbonated mule piss. Trust me on this- a real beer will not give you the jibblies the next day.
I'da been okay if I'd said 'no' to the schnapps shot later that night...but I'd had VODKA, so I was insane. Oddly, I had no hangover.
Hey, I just remembered- you once wrote something about having problems with stilts in the rain, with the ground being slick. I may have an answer for you.
At Lowe's (or any of those places) they have these aluminum plates for the bottoms of porch posts. You nail them to the bottom of a 4x4 and they have little feet on them to elevate the post so it doesn't get water trapped underneath it and rot.
If you attach those to the bottoms of your stilts, they will act as cleats and give you firm traction. I would attach them by means of a 2" screw so that they can't pull loose.
Just a thought...
No, no...thanks for the thought, but cleats on stilts won't work. It's the mushyness of the site that's the issue...never knowing when you're going to sink six inches into muck, or slide on a slick patch that you didn't see.
I can think of ways around that as well. As I recall from our brief encounter, your stilts are not exposed- they have fabric covering them, so this wouldn't have to show.
The hardware stores also sell cast iron flanges- circular plates with a threaded hole in the center, meant for attaching a pipe to a surface. If you attach one of those to the bottom with a short length of pipe (two or three inches) threaded into it, you would have something vaguely like the end of a ski pole. You would be walking on the little chunk of pipe, so it wouldn't be difficult to walk, but if you sunk in you wouldn't go far before the circular flange was supporting you as well like a small snowshoe.
(Why yes, I *am* an engineer. How did you know?...)
Trust me, the stories from "Drunk Awareness Weekend" are overly abundant - 100 UofM students exiting the bus completely blotto isn't a good start in the first place. Stir together with mud, thin crowds, stacks of empty beer cups and a lot of rain - it becomes a recipe for disaster. The Smiths were heard to say "At least they picked a slow day to do it."
Having seen the aforementioned "bubble bucket" incident first-hand, I still laugh about it and believe that you handled it *perfectly*. Who says that mimes never get the last word in?
Why, thank you. I was prepared for a dressing down for having abused a patron, but the directors didn't say anything to me. The boy found me later and apologized. 'I deserved that,' he said.
Well, he did.
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