Strangeways Here We Come

I very rarely have a night with nothing to do. There's always a class I want to take at the Y, or a church meeting, or a kid to be driven to some miscellaneous class or something. However, a couple of weeks ago I had a Saturday night where I literally had NOTHING to do. So, I thought it would be fun to lounge around and watch a movie with my kids and eat popcorn and Chex Mix. However, the cosmos always seems to find a way to tempt me out of the house when I have a free moment. This particular Saturday night I got a phone call at 5:30 from my friend. Okay, now I have to come up with a pseudonym for my friend because I know she probably doesn't want me to say who she is. Hmmm....let's call her Mandy. (Are you humming the fabulous Barry Manilow song by the same name now? How about now? Now? Did you know that he wrote that about his DOG? That's right. He wouldn't have written it about a girl because he is gay. I don't think he's ever admitted it, but he is. Totally.) Anyway, so Mandy calls me and asks me what I am doing. I told her the truth and she said that she had an extra ticket to this school fundraiser where there are skits and liquor. She had this ticket because her friend, for whom the ticket was intended, was blowing her off to go to her son's Guitar Hero championship round at his school. Sounds like the lamest made-up excuse in the world to me, but my friend Mandy bought it so who was I to say otherwise? In any case, at the time it didn't bother me to be the last minute stand-in who wasn't good enough to be invited in the first place...but now I'm wondering why I WASN'T invited in the first place. What the hell?


So, even though I thought it sounded like kind-of a stupid thing to do...I mean, a school fundraiser with skits? Sounds retarded. BUT, she did mention that there was going to be liquor so I figured I would give it a shot. So, I took a shower and drove over to her house at about 6:15 figuring that I would be home by 9:30 EASILY. Well, I was wrong. This particular fund raiser was at a Catholic high school and I guess it is pretty famous for this event which is called "Street Scenes". I knew it was a bigger deal than I had anticipated when I saw the traffic cops directing cars to auxiliary parking and school buses shuttling people from "remote parking". Apparently, this school has been doing this for 34 years and it is a really, really big deal. The tickets were $25 just to get in and then you had to buy a ticket book for drinks and food. When you walked in you got a booklet which told you about all the "lounges" and the attached room where a show would be staged. For example, there was a classroom/lounge (and don't picture your average classroom here, either. All the desks were cleared out, the walls and ceiling covered with fabric or Mylar or something and there was a stage in every room with a live band while at the back of the room was a bar. Seriously. Nobody parties like the Catholics. They advertised complimentary taxi rides home because they assumed folks were going to get shit faced...which they did. More on that later.) that was called Carmine's Hideaway which featured a martini bar and band called "The Red Eye Express". Once you got in, you were given a ticket to the corresponding skit called "Bada Bing Bada Boom, The Sopranos Graduate" which was in a different room that was all tricked out too. Get this--there was a fucking LINE to get into Carmine's Hideaway. I looked at my friend Mandy and said, "You're kidding me. I'm too old to wait in line to get in a fake bar," so we moved on. The one lounge we did go into was called "The Poorhouse Lounge" and when we walked in the band was getting ready to play another song. A blond chick in her late 20's was holding the microphone and bopping around the stage in white go-go boots, black spandex pants and a back and white striped top that was long-ish and belted...but it was not long-ish enough because her fairly sizable ass was WAY too visible for me. In any case, I figured she had to be the band's singer in a get-up like that so I prepared myself to see what she could do. The band started to play "Dancing In The Streets" and she drunkenly sang/yelled the words, "DANCIN' IN THE STREETS..." upwards of 200 times. I don't think she knew any other words, although I do think she tried to sing some of them at one point. When the song was over she handed the microphone over to the actual singer for the band and returned to her group of equally dismally dressed drunken friends. Seriously, I think this was the pinnacle of her singing career. I can't believe the band let her get up and sing...I hope someone got laid out of it.
Anyway, I kid you not when I say there were about 15 or so different "lounges" with various rooms attached where parents and alumni put on skits. We wandered into the Margarita Lounge and listened to some Jimmy Buffet wannabe band. We went into the Irish Pub and heard some "Danny Boy" (not really, but they were playing Irish music) and we hit the Mardi Gras, which was the entire cafeteria with a whole bunch of tables, a bar as long as the entire back wall and a huge stage with a 8-10 piece band. It was here that I heard the funniest and saddest conversation of the night. Mandy went off to the bar to talk to someone she knew and I declined to join her because I loathe small talk with people I am never going to see again (unless it's a bartender or someone at a concert). So I sat down at a big table all by myself and pretended to listen to the band while I was actually waiting to overhear something really good. Well, I didn't have long to wait. This really skinny drunk blond girl came stumbling over with a not-so-drunk guy. He disgustedly plopped her down on a chair and she was whining about how he didn't love her and he was mad at her because she was drunk. He was obviously disgusted but he just said something like, "Don't worry about it. It's okay," and all those other things you say to emotional drunk people. Then she really pushed his buttons and said, "I bet you don't treat your wife like this when she's drunk," and he said, "Shut up!" At this point he sort-of nodded to this other guy who was loitering around us and said something like, "Hey, Paulie. Get this bitch a cab and make sure she gets home. "
Okay, the other guy's name wasn't really Paulie. I put that in for dramatic effect. However he did tell this guy to put the "bitch" in a cab etc. In the meantime, the "bitch" said something that really told me a lot about the whole situation...she said, "What are you going to do, go back upstairs to your wife?"
Now, when she said "upstairs" she literally meant upstairs from where we were sitting because all the "lounges" were on the second floor of the school. I almost died laughing. That guy got so red in the face with anger I almost thought he was going to hit her. It made me wonder what transpired before this little conversation. I imagine this guy and his wife were hanging out in Carmine's Hideaway having a couple of cocktails and in staggers the drunk mistress. Before the wife figured out anything, the guy grabbed his friend Paulie and maneuvered the drunk mistress out into the hall where she proceeded to tell the guy she loved him and she just had to come and see him and how she didn't care about his wife being there, blah, blah, blah.
All this drama at a high school fund raiser!!
At one point Mandy and I were at a table right in the middle of the main thoroughfare and I saw more drunken people lookin' to get laid than I have since college. I'm telling you, there were hundreds and hundred of people there. I bet they raised $250,000 just that night alone. (Did I tell you that they do this for two nights in a row?)
The big question is....how did they clean all the puke out of the bathrooms in time for the second night?