Mediocre Food, Music and Company

I don’t socialize much. It’s not that I’m an unsociable person. It’s more that I don’t know that many people who are smart enough I’d bother to kill them and eat their brains.

For example, last night. Dinner at a chain slightly more upscale than Applebees. For a dozen. The ambient noise was like back when the old PSA engine repair facility was a few miles from my house and they’d test jet engines in this huge hangar just west of Miramar Naval Air Station on the same evening that the carrier fleet returned from a long deployment and the planes got to fly home all at once and were piloted by guys who didn’t so much forget about the rules about not flying the low and fast flight path over my house as who simply didn’t have any fucks to give. Only louder.

Some of the dinner conversation I heard from the woman on my left whose name I forgot within a nanosecond of being introduced:

Unknown Stranger: What church do you go to?

Me:  I don’t.

US:  But don’t you need to belong to some sort of community?

Me:  Um. Apparently not.

US:  Um. We go to Sonrise. You should join us tomorrow blah blah pancake breakfast blah blah.

WISIMH:  All this talk about pancake breakfasts makes me feel all stabby, especially as I’m sitting here trying to find the chicken in my chicken salad buried beneath the iceberg lettuce that’s all rusty around the edges.  I feel my peripheral vision blacking out and getting all tunnel-shaped as I concentrate on not picking up the steak knife they served me with my chicken salad for some reason. Maybe, there is a reason. Maybe there is a god.

Later, we went to a live music dinner theater where we were treated to a fresh interpretation of “I Need Your Love” sung by a bald guy in a snow white tux jacket who is a border guard by day. It hasn’t aged well: the song, I mean. The guy himself was at least enjoying himself. The newest song they performed was Brown-Eyed Girl, in which we, the audience, sang the chorous sha la la la blah blah. It was the high point of my evening. Seriously. Which is sad.

The company at my cozy table for 4 in the front row included Linda from Toledo who listed her 10 siblings and then tried to count how many were still alive and who gave up somewhere early on the second hand. Seven, I think. Leaving, let’s see here, four dead fucks I don’t give.

Guy at Table:  That guitarist has an old 1040s Gibson Stratosomething sitting on a stand there. I sure hope he plays it.

Me:  Wow. Want me to create a diversion so you can steal it and sneak out the back door?

Guy:  (Trying to figure out if I’m kidding.) (I’m not.) Well, it could be just a reproduction. I’ll ask him at the intermission.

WISIMH:  Intermission? This is going to go on long enough for me to queue with the other middle-aged women to use the 3-stall head while we pass by the door to the unoccupied men’s room? There’s an unmarked door between the two bathrooms. Perhaps it’s death’s door. Pardon me, my table-friends, while I go knock. Or maybe just ring the bell and run away.

After intermission, the guitarist did an Eric Clapton song accompanying the fifty-something soprano guy in the shiny blue tux jacket and a snappy bowtie that wasn’t tied but just casually left around his neck to tell us all how he was so past the entrenched narrative of 70s cool that he could defy all those conventional rules dude. The guitar solo kicked ass. So, that was nice.

After the show pretend ended, then ended for real, I thanked my host and hostess and said I couldn’t stay for the cake with a rainbow.

Me:  Thanks for a wonderful evening.

Hostess/Birthday Girl:  Aren’t you staying for cake?

Me:  No, I can’t. My refrigerator icemaker is broken and leaking into a bucket and the bucket must be full by now, so I have to go home and empty it.

WISIMH:  Besides, if I stayed, I probably mention that the rainbow has been co-opted by The Gays and possibly have to talk about how I can’t make it to the homophobic pancake breakfast tomorrow.

Me: (To Host) I’ve had a wonderful evening.

WISMH:  This wasn’t it.

Host:  Aren’t you going to stay and give Kirsten your name so you can come back for a free show next month?

WISIMH:  I’d rather go the pancake breakfast tomorrow, after first listening to a sermon about how Edward Snowdon caused Benghazi, and how gay marriage is  destroying the traditional family who goes to diner theater 70s music reviews.

Me:  Can’t now. Refrigerator icemaker excuse. Talk to you later. Thanks again.

WISIMH:  I so seriously don’t have to get out more. And the Gibson was a reproduction, not an original 1940-something like the rest of all y'all.