Reading: Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

Christmas: done and wrapped.

Learning: maybe I do like wine. Stop the presses (not the wine presses).

Moving: the gym later, I think, after I recover from my hangover. It's a only smoke hangover--I drank maybe half a glass.

Listening: "She's a Brick House"

Viewing: everyone dancing

19 December 1999: Party

Last night I went to Sabrina and Barbie's girl party, which they held at Sabrina's house. Sabrina's husband is a carpenter doing fine finishings so their house is fantastic. They bought a diamond in the rough and now their modest house on a modest street is a sparkling gem. Their replastered walls shimmer like frescoes; their entryway has a pressed tin ceiling; their bathroom is a work of art (maybe I should take pictures of it for Beth). So is their pantry. Really. I called it the Pottery Barn house once before, I think because of two armoires Mr. Sabrina made. The bathroom is painted a wonderfully warm tone of pine green, has a clawfoot tub (with the toes painted the wall color), no shower (just an elegant hand-held thing to rinse in the bath), and silver accessories.

Since I was there last they've enclosed a section of their deck. It's going to be a tv room, but a tv room with baroque cabinets and swank paint. (I don't know if the cabinets are baroque or rococo or what; I just pulled a period design term out of my capacious but feeble skull.) The paint is swank because it's Ralph Lauren paint and has little beads in it, like a Bioré cleansing scrub (this was Sabrina's description). So it's textured like river rocks, according to Polo Boy.

Anyway. My pesto turned out fine. Maybe a mite heavy on the garlic, but that's no crime. I threw three packets of basil in the food processor, being far too lazy to do it the Right way (in a mortar with a pestle), added an ounce or two of piñon, a chunk of romano, and some salt (which I did pulverize in the mortar; I've been waiting for opportunity to confess that HAO calls us salt snobs because we have a jar of sea or rock salt in little crystals). While that spun and ground in the processor, I mindlessly peeled cloves of garlic and threw them in too. When I tasted the pesto, I was overcome. Which is the effect I like to achieve, but maybe others don't. Oops. I added more nuts and cheese to soften the flavor, regretting that I had not reserved any basil, whose taste, I reprimanded myself, is supposed to dominate. Olive oil helped too. I resolved not to breathe on anyone.

I boiled the two kinds of tortellini I'd bought, roast garlic and cheese & herb, dumped the pesto in with a little more olive oil, and called it done. I had painted two canisters that bottles of scotch had come in, red and green, and taped a length of wrapping paper around a huge (maybe six or eight inches in diameter) Cytomax (a sport drink mix) canister (empty), and called the three vessels cookie jars. I filled the little one with cream cheese cookies, the medium with with snowballs, and carefully lay the cookie cutter rabbits, kangaroos, angels, Christmas trees, apples, reindeer, doves, moose, stars, and gingerfolk in the big one and put mochaccinos on top. A tupperware full of tortellini, the present, and a banana for the ride, a buddy locked in his cage, a paper heart left under RDC's pillow, and I was on my way.

After lusting after the house, eating, drinking, and making exciting underwear (there--I'm quoting a different movie), the gift exchange commenced. Barbie, being slightly bloodthirsty, had these rules: we each would draw a number and then, one by one, select a gift from under the tree; whoever drew 1 would be stuck with her present, but 4 could demand the already-opened and obviously desirable 1 2 or 3 gift instead of opening a new one. There were 15 of us, and Barbie pulled 15, which we all insisted was rigged since it meant she could have her pick of presents.

Number 1 was indeed stuck with her present, a pair of hairy pink slippers. Number 2 chose the Victoria's Secret bag with the Victoria's Secret box and was much disappointed to find naught but a Chia Pet from Walgreen's inside. Then 3, Legs (a premed student working her way through school as a stripper, whom Westword voted Best Legs in Denver), selected my offering.

When I arrived and put my present under the tree, I was nervous that it was just wrapped and not in a gift bag. It looked small and tawdry. "We'll point and jeer at it later," Barbie promised me. So when Legs settled down with the thing in her lap, Barbie led the room in taunting guffaws while I hung my head. Legs unwrapped the massage oil first and did one of her dance routines, modified for sitting down, of dousing herself and getting all sticky....She is the first stripper I've known personally and she's been an education for me. Then she opened the wooden massage implement, four balls on a handle, but almost missed the other little roller thing I thought looked like a sexual aid. I didn't bring home the Polaroids of our various experiments with that, although everyone seemed in favor of my suggestion that I make a web page of the party pix for all to see and share. Little do they know.

Eventually it was my turn. I was going to choose the polka-dotted bag because it was polka-dotted, but someone (whom I'd never met before but immediately liked because she looks kind of like HAO's roommate and whose best friend (whom I'd also never met before) looks like KREL) nodded at another package all done up in a tasteful gold paper and glistening white ribbon.

I untied the ribbon and put it around my neck, thinking to tie up my hair. I arrived with my hair in its usual bun, but I had other plans for it. "Barbie, I have a treat for you," I alluded, remembering. I got up to put my hairpins safely in my--my--leather jacket and came back with my hair down. She's always after me to leave it down. At a party last summer she told me she was tempting to pluck the stick from my leather barrette and run off with it, to free my hair. I plucked it myself, but all that happened was that my inverted braid with two sharp kinks in it fell down like a Slinky, still elasticked at the end. But now it was all down. She wanted to smell it. Sabrina said she had never seen it down. So anyway I couldn't disappoint them with a ribboned ponytail.

I tore open the paper. California Exotic Novelties' Gold Egg Pocket Exotic. Multi-speed stimulator powered by the Swedish Erotic battery pack. Comact, powerful, pocket-sized! "Wash before and after each use. DO not getty battery end of vibrator wet. DO NOT IMMERSE IN WATER. Do not share with other sexual partners. Help to prevent sexually transmitted diseases through the use of condoms, sexual education, proper judgement [sic] and," I paused for to assume proper tone and emphasis, "rigorous, diligent," flat monotone again, "care. Remove batteries from vibrator when not in use."

That egg might be pocket sized, but it doesn't do any good in a pocket. The battery pack, whose top end peeks between my third and fourth fingers, isn't too subtle either. Perhaps you could say it was your insulin pack, or a cell phone battery, or, or, well, something.

Of course, though tragically, someone with a higher number stole my egg. I cannot be the goose that laid the golden egg. That thief was, also of course, Barbie, but she brought about her own downfall by desiring it so obviously (the fact that I circled the room giving kneepit massages--"Do y'all watch 'Ally McBeal'?" probably helped too). The egg went home with a single woman: "I need it more than you guys."

And here's Sabrina, unwrapping her stretchy purple thong panties from another attendee's lingerie shop. I'll have to visit it, and not just because it has purple underwear. Apparently they're all bra-fitting experts. Anyway, isn't Sabrina just lovely? Okay, maybe it's not the best picture ever, but really, she is. She's the one I confused with a classmate, because honestly, if you ever met Sabrina, you too would be so overcome by her loveliness that you would want everyone you met to be she.

Gift-giving and -stealing done, dancing commenced. Barbie danced like she'd just won the world cup, which is why she's so much fun to have at a party. So did Sabrina, for a little while, long enough for me to realize that while Barbie and I sliced at the tummy would have circular cross-sections, Sabrina's would be oval. I love that shape.

I was going to go home a few times, thinking I wasn't in a dancing mood, but I was mistaken. I was giving Clove a backrub when Barbie kicked Frank Sinatra out and invited the Village People in, so I might have danced on Clove's tush just a bit, but after a bracing scalp massage I called her done and stood up in time for "She's a Brick House."

Hearing "YMCA" reminded me that I hadn't told Barbie that RDC danced with me (and everyone else) at RRP's wedding. I told her how proud I was of him.

Oh! It's a good thing RDC had been gone for four days or I might have been mad at him. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all. I mentioned that when I talked to him today, RDC said he'd seen CLH and, he told me gleefully, she thinks I'll like my Christmas present.
"What are you getting?" asked someone, somewhat inanely.
"I don't know. That's why I'm mad. I want to know and I want to be surprised and it's all his fault."
Clove reflected. "I know what you're getting."
Poop. RDC must have told Dexy who of course told Clove and now everyone but me knows and it's just not fair.

Also I drank a glass of wine. This was such a landmark event that Clove had to document it on film.

I think Clove thought to ask me for a backrub, which Dexy never provides for her, because I had asked yet another woman I'd never met before (almost two thirds of those present) if I could play with her hair. I've done this before. I get in these moods. Rhonda now thinks I'm the bee's knees because of it. We exchanged business cards. I think people ought still to have just social cards. Business cards are so...businessy.

I left soon after 1, earlier than I planned but pretty good for not having napped, and as the entryway's light fell on the living room floor I smiled, because there was RDC's computer bag. I showered off the smoke (but not from my hair), brushed teeth and braided hair, peed, and joined my husband in bed.

---

Tonight I am still more tired and plus I have a smoke hangover. Today I am going to nap. Tomorrow I am going to get film developed, from Thanksgiving and SEM's visit and last night, and reflect happily on my pals. It's been a good month.

P.S. I must just add that my son is insane. He's spent most of the past two hours in his oatmeal box (one of two--the other's by his cage) under the windowsill. Very quietly. His preening doesn't make much noise from eight feet away, but I'm not even sure he's preening in there. Every once in a while, to reassure myself that he's alive, I call his name. He puts his head out of the box but knows that I don't mean it so retreats backward into the box. Okay, now I can hear scrabbling as he chews the edges of the flaps of the sealed end that form one wall, but still, there's not much noise. He hasn't been chattering either. I think he's got dirty magazines in there.