In which there’s so much to tell you. Oh my babies, such a weekend! With pictures, even.
Friday
The Holy Couple’s engagement party was celebrated Friday night at the Dead Cock. There was a party of 30 upstairs in the new restaurant; we were the new kitchen’s guinea pigs. The food — buffet-style hors d’oeuvres — included shrimp alfredo and crab-stuffed mushrooms and bruschetta salad, and was really quite good. It was almost like being in another town entirely! But the flatware was decoratively trendy and blatantly right-handed, which irritated me. I ended up eating with my fingers.
Bread and I were fashionably late to arrive, from having accidentally napped after ravishing one another when I got home from work, but we were just in time for dinner.
After food and drinks and toasts (the bride-to-be’s father almost cried, so sweet), the party moved downstairs into the bar proper. There were champagne-and-rum jello shots, and a keg of Rolling Rock for the party guests. There was a DJ. There were the usual Friday-night-small-town-meatmarket patrons. The party guests and the bar crowd intermingled. Hilarity ensued.
I danced some, drank some, socialized some. Saw my stylist; saw her have an argument with a guy I assume is her boyfriend that went something like, “You said one beer! You’ve had five!” Saw two boys that I rather suspect had once been dating but now appear to be estranged (this is just a guess, neither of them are out) have a really awkward conversation in the middle of a swirling, packed bar. Saw two chicks I don’t know come out of the women’s bathroom with that ‘I just did a big fat line of coke off the back of the toilet’ vibe on.
Saw lots of people react in interesting ways to the jeweled bindi I was wearing. One guy motioned me over and said, “May I ask a question?”
“Sure, ‘sup?”
He pointed at my forehead. “How does that stay on?”
“Glue.”
A beat. “No,” he said. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. Glue, dude. Cosmetic glue. Like for false eyelashes?”
He had no idea what I was talking about, so I went back to dancing. It was cute.
Saw short, fat chicks in oversized t-shirts do excellent Latin moves on the dance floor. Saw my favorite bartender bust his ass making about two hundred Jaeger Bombs. Saw drunken rednecks get all up in each other’s faces. Saw a lot of fantastic cleavage. (Watch out! Here’s some now:)
Basically, I had a really good time. It was especially nice that Bread wasn’t nagging me to leave, and that Ray had shown up so I had my girl to dance with. (She was wearing the most fantastic outfit: a black zipped hoodie with a hot pink AC/DC logo on it, black pedal pushers, and strappy black pumps. She so rocks.) The party was in full fucking swing.
Suddenly, at about ten to one, two guys came crashing in through the plate glass window at the front of the bar and hit the floor hard.
Apparently they’d been fighting, had taken it outside, and then brought it back in by throwing each other through the window. I didn’t see it (I was at the back of the bar at the time), but Bread did and he said it was the absolute pinacle of bar fights. He feels he can die happy now, having literally seen it all. “It was great,” he enthused. “I’ve only ever seen that in movies!”
Within seconds of the crash, the music was shut off abruptly and all three bartenders were screaming, “Party’s over! THE BAR IS CLOSED! Move out, people!” Bread gathered me up like a fussy mother hen and we were probably halfway to Batavia before the ambulance even arrived on the scene.
I heard the next day that both the participants went to the hospital and were released and then spent the night in jail. I heard the Dead Cock’s owner has agreed not to press charges against them if the window is paid for. (It’s a huge sheet of plate glass, so I’m certain the replacement value will be quite high.)
Needless to say, we missed the after-party, if there even was one. I’m proud of Bread for staying out ’til one o’clock in the morning… no doubt a huge goddamned sacrifice on his part.
Saturday
Saturday morning, in bed, I took the following picture of myself and my dog Shiva (and this one, too). Apparently my cell phone’s camera has a built-in “antique” setting:
Aren’t we cute? If there’s one thing I do well, it’s bedroom hair. *wink*
Bread went to Cedar Rapids to look at a job remodelling his sister’s new house, and I lazed around. All. Damn. Day. and enjoyed having the house utterly to myself. NLW and I had mumbled something to one another about maybe seeing a movie Saturday night, but it didn’t happen… which is probably good, since I literally can’t afford it and she’s already bought me a movie ticket this month.
Bread and I are now at that stage of poverty (today marks the seventh week of his unemployment) where it ceases to be at all amusing. We’ve run out of savings. As in, I have ten bucks in cash and that’s literally it. (I am really, really not interested in living on credit cards.) How I’m going to buy gas and lunch all week is beyond me at this point, but Bread mentioned something about hocking an assault rifle so we’ll see how that goes.
I made Thai chickpea curry and jasmine rice for dinner. Bread fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV. I watched some South Park and went to bed. I listened to a lot of remixes on my iPod before falling asleep.
Sunday
Sunday afternoon, before getting in the shower before band practice, I took the kitchen shears in one hand, pulled all my hair back to the nape of my neck with the other… and whacked it all off in one swell foop. I now have a completely crooked bob – crooked as in tacky, 80’s-style noticeably asymmetrical. Ah, fuck it: I graduated from highschool in the 80’s and I can have asymmetrical hair if I want to!
Rehearsal was fun, as always. The band learned a song I wrote, and BvB and GSW came up with the catchiest, most adorable backup part IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE. The drum-playing half of the rhythm section was in a fantastic mood; the bass-playing half had fucked up his back and was grumpy and required lots of petting and hugs. (BvB’s hubby eventually gave him a handful of hydrocodone, which probably adjusted his mood much for the better when he got home and took them.)
I got home at a quarter past seven and promply went to bed. Now it’s Monday and I’m at work and I really should be, you know, working. I’ve got a failing server full of sites that need to be moved — yay tedious goddamned server chores! Yay extra hours at work!
