Moments Like That

Last night my housemates and I made dinner together, something we rarely do. We made cauliflower-leek soup with dill (our own dill from the garden, as a matter of fact), sautéed asparagus (because we love nothing more than we love asparagus), chicken with honey-mustard sauce, and strawberry-rhubarb crisp (frozen strawberries because they’re not in season and we will have no truck with not-in-season strawberries in this household, missy, but some of our own rhubarb from the aforementioned garden, booyah, although I admit it got a little burned and I should have put more sugar in it). I put on my Summer Mix and Treasa and I danced around while we chopped and stirred and blended and we used plates and forks and knives like civilized people. It was a great end to a great weekend.

Friday night I had plans to see my friend Sharon’s burlesque show. I hadn’t seen her perform for just over a year and I was excited to see her new piece and new costume. This time last year I was actually thinking about taking a class but I chickened out. After watching the show I started to think I’d maybe be ready to do it this year…but of course I’m leaving so I will have to pursue that in New Zealand if at all, I guess.

I carpooled over there with Renee and Scott, which made no sense in terms of the map (work in the U District –> home to Ballard –>then back to Capitol Hill area –> Belltown –> back to Capitol Hill –> back to Ballard = no sense) but made me happy in terms of camaraderie and not having to find parking. We got there early and got raffle tickets (the show was a benefit for the Burlesque Museum) and when people started their pieces I thought, as I’ve done before, about the benefit of glamour if you are ashamed of your body. One of the things I love about burlesque (well, good burlesque) is that it is so totally dependant on attitude and presentation. I guess all compelling performance is. It really has nothing to do with body size or shape…a lesson I have a very difficult time learning and still, after all these years, don’t really understand. Women of every description were up there and it felt so relaxing to just lay aside, even for an hour, the body fascism expectations that are so deeply ingrained in me for reasons I cannot comprehend (unless it’s all the advertising images, or something). Women with bellies, with hips and thighs and wobbly arms, lusciously teasing the audience, revealing and withholding and completely inhabiting, owning their bodies. It was breathtaking to me. One of the reasons I bellydance is to try to convince myself week by week, that I live in this body and so I should love and enjoy it and treat it well instead of being made and hateful at it all the time, and I am starting to think that burlesque might help me with that too.

It was an excellent show. Chris and Amy and Erik all showed up looking hot and we cheered very loudly for our girl, who wore a delicious polka-dot number and seduced us all to the melodious strains of Frank Sinatra and of COURSE was the best of everyone. Close seconds were the very adorable hula act (very difficult to remove coconut shells) as well as the dangerously alluring (and hot like fire, frankly) Shanghai Pearl, who not only rocked a pistol tucked in her stocking but also mixed it up a little by doing a reverse striptease, i.e. she took one dress off and then put another completely different dress on. Taking off your clothes in a cool non-awkward manner is a challenge, as anyone who has ever struggled with her bra clasps at the end of a long day will readily attest, but putting on clothes in front of people is possibly even rougher, I think. She made it look easy though and we were all duly impressed. The geeks among us were also charmed by one cool girl who did a whole thing with a big calculator (with “69” typed in, of course, and covered in sequins on the back) that was super cute. Her pasties with the pi sign on them were a huge hit. We had a harder time with someone who not only chowed down on handfuls of ketchup-flavored potato chips during her act, meaning she had to then chew for like five hours as she did her thing, but also, for reasons that still elude me, poured half a bottle of Heinz 57 down her throat. And she was dressed as a nurse. I didn’t get it.

At the very end of the show was a guy…a guy…called Simply Steve. Sharon says that it’s called boylesque when a man does it. I say it’s called A Near Miss With Cardiac Arrest. He came out in a four-piece lavender suit, which normally I would completely support, and gave out candy to the audience, which, also good…but then, I don’t know. When he started taking off his stuff I just felt really weird and couldn’t look. Totally different experience from my stripper in ways I couldn’t quite articulate. It’s possible that it was because he wasn’t super giant buff guy like my stripper was, and that my tolerance for a wide variety of female bodies does not extend to male bodies, which, if that’s so, would probably be worth an entry to itself. Or it’s possible that it’s because his presence was actively very different from the other performers, and not just because of sex or gender. I think it’s because he wasn’t as connected to the audience…there was no sense of artifice, somehow. The other performers were, to me, very clearly playing characters, and somehow Simply Steve just wasn’t and it was a little weird. Less polished, certainly. It felt a little like how I must look when I try on clothes in my room and lip-synch to Erasure songs late at night. I wonder if all boylesque is like that? I will have to see some more and report back, I guess. Right now all I can say is that although the M&M pasties were a nice touch, I do wish he’d maybe worn a more opaque thong.

Visual trauma notwithstanding, we felt the evening was an unqualified success when our table pooled all our raffle tickets and won a dozen Top Pot doughnuts, the Feather Boa kind. I went up on stage to get them and I got to briefly bask in the presence of the gorgeous Miss Indigo Blue herself, who was decked out in this Carmen Miranda costume that truly had to be seen to be believed. The table behind us won some cupcakes and so we traded a couple with them, and then it was off to sushi because there just wasn’t enough yummy food available.

Someone asked where the afterparty was, after we all staggered out, and Renee mentioned the existence of her and Scott’s hot tub. Amy and Erik were sorry they hadn’t brought along their matching gold bikinis but they put their chins up and pledged to try to enjoy themselves anyway, and off we all went back to the house for a soak. It was a full moon and we sort of overflowed the tub and we had to keep remembering to keep our voices down because we were all so amusing and hilarious. And I forget how it happened but then all of a sudden Renee and Sharon were insisting that Amy and I, as bellydance newbies, watch this crazy bellydance video that involved, I am not even lying, a flaming digeridoo. A digeridoo, on fire. What that has to do with bellydance, tribal fusion or otherwise, remains uncertain, but I promise you that your life is a hollow shell until you see a flaming digeridoo. A digeridoo, I repeat, on fire.

Renee and Sharon co-direct the famous and fantastic InFusion and they are both very involved in the smallish bellydance world. They refer to their and their troupemates’ husbands as The Yokos. I’ve seen the Yokos at many a performance, of course, and I knew that they’re all very supportive of their partners’ commitment to dance, which is extremely awesome. It wasn’t until Friday night though, as we were screaming and laughing about that ridiculous video, that I realized how into their partners’ art they really are. Chris and Scott (and to some extent Erik, although he is new to the bellydance thing because Amy’s only been dancing a year) were getting all het up about various technique things (“Could she put her arms DOWN for once, hello?”) and were gossiping about various scandals in the tribal community and I thought about how lucky I am to be around these men. I adore their wives immensely, but I’d seek those women out regardless of who their partners were. The guys, though. Sometimes I get cynical about men, even though I know it’s not cool to hate on fully half the human population, negative experiences notwithstanding. Scott and Chris and Erik are so fun to hang around, so hilarious and gentle and non-homophobic (ask me about my pet peeves!) and so completely devoted to my friends yet not in that ooky couples way, you know, like you’re at someone’s house for dinner and she goes to the bathroom and you’re stuck talking to her husband for three minutes and by minute two you are looking for ways to sneak out the window while he drones on about user capability interfaces or whatever the hell. It shouldn’t surprise me that fabulous women would partner with fabulous men but it’s always nice to see, and it does my heart such good to be around them.

Schmoopiness aside, I made it back to Ballard at the sort-of-rockstar hour of one a.m. and got to sleep for five and a half hours before my sweet friend Kat called. Thursday she’d called to say that she was going to be in Seattle overnight and that she had some time in the morning to hang out, so after a few minutes of clutching my pillow to me and promising it that I would always love it and that I would return to it someday, someday when the world wasn’t so cruel as to force me to get up at my usual weekday hour on a beautiful Saturday, I slumped down to the car and headed to the airport.

Seattle is flirting with me again lately, in terms of weather. Rainier was out in full regalia as I headed south and I noticed by the time we got back to Ballard for breakfast it was too hot for sneakers. Kat’s leaving for Ghana right around the same time I leave for New Zealand and we’d both got our orientation packets this past week. Mine was hilarious, about six pages long, and said stuff like “The official language of New Zealand is English” and “Kiwis are not only fruit, they’re birds!” and “The internet is a good resource for more information about New Zealand!” Kat’s packets was more like, “If you don’t take your malaria pills, you will die.” She’ll be living in student housing for a year doing her research and needs to bring not only a year’s worth of shampoo but also all her own textbooks and gel media so that she can actually do her experiments, as well as her very own pillow because the university can’t provide that sort of thing for students. Since she’s an international student she will have only one roommate; the Ghanaians at the university, the top one percent of the society, sleep nine to a room. I’m really excited for both of our trips, but hers seems so much more daunting than mine and I’m weirdly a little jealous of that. (She says she’s jealous that I’ll be able to get whatever kind of shampoo I want. I’m jealous that when she gets to the university part of the first week includes traditional dance lessons and getting a whole new awesome Ghanaian wardrobe made). It’s always wonderful to be with her, my dear friend, and it was even more fun this time because we got to talk about itty bitty details about traveling and packing and flying and everything that no one else wants to hear about but which takes up more and more space in my brain as the weeks fly by.

Our time together was too short, of course, and once I dropped her off in Madrona I proceeded to get promptly lost the way I always do in that neighborhood. I finally found Lake Washington Boulevard and Seattle was at it again, with the sun shining and the lake sparkling and the birds singing. We’ve gone very quickly from cherry blossoms to azaleas and it was enough to make me almost not mind getting stuck in traffic for eleven hundred hours as every single city resident decided that today would be a good day to go to the park or to Green Lake or to the zoo. I made it home in time for a declaration that I was never getting in the car again and a quick nap before I had to go to Angela’s birthday/bachelorette party.

Now, Angela. I met Angela less than a year ago at a dinner party and fell promptly and wholeheartedly in love. This past Halloween I hung out with her and her fiancée and her brother (who were the Beastie Boys-as-seventies-cops from the Sabotage video, hello brilliant) and had the best time ever, and we’ve had a couple of brunches and dinners, and she and MCA and Mike D also came to my birthday party. I was very touched that she invited me to her wedding because we haven’t known each other that long, and was really sad when I realized that I have a work conference thing in Phoenix that very weekend and couldn’t go. I received her work-of-art invitation the other week and felt even worse I couldn’t make it, but I kind of figured that I would just see her before I leave and that I wouldn’t know anyone but her and her new husband at the wedding anyway so it might even be kind of weird and awkward to go. I was super glad to be invited to her bachelorette because I thought it would be a good time to hang out with her, even though I was a little nervous that the phrase “downtown nightspots” was mentioned in the evite.

I don’t know if you know this about me, but up until now my life has not much resembled an episode of that Sex And The City show I heard so much about in the early 2000s. The evite said we were supposed to meet at a bar/art gallery and then go around to other bars, drinking drinks, I guess. I’m fine now with hanging out in bars socially, something I essentially never did in my life until about two years ago, and I have even discovered a couple of non-alcoholic fake drinks to order that don’t make me look twelve years old. (“Barkeep! Another Shirley Temple! And keep them coming!”) It’s always at someone else’s behest, though, I guess because I’d rather spend money and calories on food rather than drinks. I would never suggest going to Belltown just to hang out, because it turns out that pajamas are inappropriate hang-out-wear outside my living room, and thanks a lot, everyone, for not even telling me that.

But, still, my adoration of Angela trumped my inadequate wardrobe and backwards social graces, so off I trundled to the first stop of the night in slightly scary Pioneer Square, wearing a pretty skirt at least. It turned out to be a sports bar slash art gallery, which was a little non-plussing, but the first of Angela’s many fantastic friends was there to meet me and the art was cool and then more people showed up and I had a fake (I refuse to say “virgin”) mojito which was very yummy and I didn’t feel shy or out of place at all, which was pretty cool considering I literally only knew three people there. I did discover that “I TOTALLY won some DOUGHNUTS at a RAFFLE at BURLESQUE last night!” is a great conversational opener. Also I think it’s just that good people attract other good people so everyone was very friendly and cute and pretty and that made me think that maybe I wouldn’t go home at nine o’clock after all, as I’d secretly planned. We hadn’t left for the next place, Ibiza, before I was publicly lamenting the fact that I had to go to stupid Phoenix for a stupid conference, especially when I learned that Dudley Manlove is going to play the wedding.

We click-clacked from Ibiza, where we’d got to sit down on sparkly couches and I had a fake raspberry mojito to Starlite Lounge where we also got to sit down and had cupcakes (again with the cupcakes!) to celebrate Angela’s birthday. Fabulous women kept joining us and everyone was so pretty and we talked about everything and laughed and I felt a little like I was in a movie, I have to say. Angela smiled the whole time and was so beautiful and everyone just loved her so much and was so glad that a) she’d been born and b) she was getting married and thus that she could wear both a tiara and a birthday hat. There was another, rival, bachelorette party at the Starlite, complete with crazy veil and Suck For A Buck shenanigans, and our group leveled icy stares at them as they screeched and postured. I leaned over to the girls I was sitting next to, delicately wiping the cupcake frosting from my face, and suggested we pit our gorgeous trilingual bride with very good hair against their clearly inferior, skanky, cell-phone-screamer bride. We discussed ways in which we could provoke the confrontation before settling that a Beat-It-video-style knife fight, with the wrists tied together and everything, would be the best method. Sadly that bride and her entourage left the premises while we were singing Happy Birthday, so, as usual with my great ideas, it didn’t go through.

We went to Viceroy to meet up with the guys (because men deserve bachelorette parties too), who weren’t there, which was fine as it was so crowded that I accidentally had sex with a couple of strangers on my way to the bathroom, and then settled in at The Apartment which was also very crowded but at least had fries with garlic aioli. We all finally wedged into a booth and I held hands with Angela and thrust my fist at the sky and announced that I would do everything in my power to ditch my dumb work thing and make it to the wedding, because I have to hang out with these people again before I leave, I just have to. I’d had two or three sparkling waters by this point and I was feeling pretty emotional, which was my cue that I was experiencing my weird ability to get contact drunk, which I first noticed at JournalCon 2003, where I woke up the next morning with a sore throat and a headache and the feeling that I wanted to die. All after a hard night pounding ginger ale, of course. I was all into “I love everyone, man!” and looking deep into Angela’s eyes and pledging my troth to her and telling her that I would move heaven and earth to be at her wedding. (“Plus,” I said, “I have this really good dress to wear and I can’t let it go to waste!”)

The party eventually broke up, right when I was feeling that I never wanted to go home and that also I had to go home or I would suffer mightily the next day, and I got in by two that morning, after telling everyone how fabulous they were and how much I adored them. Then, finally, Sunday, I got to sleep in. Until eight. Not too impressive for a fake hangover, but I guess you take what you can get in this life sometimes. I then proceeded to have one of my favorite types of days, the sweetly puttering sort. After breakfast it turned out John and Treasa were going to the Sunday market too and we all walked down together and I got to test-drive my new ridiculously expensive prescription sunglasses (verdict: they’re a little silly-looking, which is exactly what I was going for). I scored the abovementioned awesome organic asparagus and totally abused the sampling privileges over at the pluot stand and then Ben from Ballard Organics recognized me from when I conned him into posing for me and asked for the site address, which made me feel famous and cool.

When we got home I had lunch on the back porch and Treasa washed their car and John hung out with Joachin the tortoise, who is done with hibernation for the winter and was itching to eat some lawn dandelions. Then there was about an hour there, before I headed off to get food to make dinner, where we chatted and laughed and my orange sheets waved in the breeze and the sun shone and I felt that, even though there is a lot of pain and suffering and confusion in the world, there are also moments, times and places, where you get it right, where you get both what you want and what you need. My weekend gave me so many moments like that. I am so in love with so much of my world right now.