A friend and I went to a burlesque show, finding seats at a high table in the back of the venue. Before long, a couple came and asked if the other two seats were taken. We said they weren’t and invited them to join us. The boyfriend went to the bar for drinks, and we introduced ourselves to the woman and made polite chit-chat while we waited for the show to commence. In very short order, we learned the following:
- The couple had been together for three years; that night was their anniversary.
- As she put it, “I just turned 30, so of course we’ve moved into the basement of my mom’s house.”
- Her mother is crazy. This introduced a brief side discussion of whether her mom was “crazy crazy” or just “mom crazy”. Mostly we settled on merely mom crazy.
- Our table companion then talked about getting a DUI about three months ago, which resulted in her being on house arrest for two months.
- As part of the house arrest, she was being tested pretty regularly for alcohol consumption.
- No big deal, she just stayed home for two months doing whippits instead of drinking. (Whippits, if you don’t know, is slang for cylinders of nitrous oxide.)
- Well, at least until she found out that she could leave the house for medical appointments. Whereupon she started making a raft of appointments for massage, acupuncture, acupressure, whatever. “That shit is cheap as fuck!”
- This was a themed burlesque show, and my companion was in costume as one of the theme characters. As window dressing, I had brought a dish of gummy bears and a bottle of glue. (Bonus points if you can identify the theme from those clues.) Our table companion opened the jar and sniffed it to verify it was really glue. And again. And again. Before the show was even half way over, our table companion was clearly reeling from huffing glue. “Wow, this really takes me back to my teenage years!”, she said with a grin. Repeatedly.
- She knew one of the performers, and before the show began her friend came to the table and asked, “When I do my routine, would you be okay if I came to your table and put whipped cream on you and licked it off? Or put it on me and had you lick it off?” “Hell yeah!”, our table mate exclaimed. Her partner (who had since returned) provided the obligatory dirty sneer. “Burlesque and whipped cream; -that’s- an anniversary!” I could not resist adding my own smart-ass observation, “And how appropriate; the third anniversary is the Whipped Cream anniversary.”
Suffice to say, it was an entertaining evening.