Lipstick on a Pig

Earlier this week, I was forced (for reasons I won't go into) to order a pair of pants from Land's End Business. You wouldn't think it would be that difficult; but you go to their website, and place your order, and input the size and the quantity, and then do you know what? They want your inseam!

I don't know that. I'm really more of a skirt person, but when I do buy pants, I generally find that whatever I'm buying, right off the rack, reaches the floor. Unless they're capris. So I have no earthly idea what my inseam is, and the whole enterprise ended with me, hopping off-balance around the room, holding the end of a wildly flailing metal hardware-store tape measure up to my crotch and swearing profusely. My kids will be telling their therapist about this someday.

Okay, so I will go into the reasons. I have to deal with the public these days; not on a regular basis, only once in a while when the people whose actual job it is to do this have to go to lunch or something, but it's a damn sight more than I used to. And that means I have to have a uniform.

After only a few days of dealing with the public - in one-hour increments - I think I understand why. The public consists largely of middle-aged men who will hit on you unless you're wearing something that would make a nun grumble. They do this while their wives are four feet away, riffling through the brochures on what there is to see and do in Yoakum. Earlier this week, one asked to order a beer. These men have no shame.

But, believe it or not, my job is not only about unwanted male attention and con-artist motivational speakers lately. This week, we selected a professional voice talent to give recorded information over our toll-free line. The minus side of this is that I won't get to wax rhapsodic about where the wildflowers are anymore; but on the plus side, I got to sit in on four hours of conference calls, listening to our contact recite more than 2,200 place names in the state of Texas and making sure that we have the correct pronunciation for each and every one.

This is what I went to school for.

Well, except of course that I never graduated. But no matter! I'm using the degree I would have gotten! Because after our calls, I came away with a list of about 75 place names we still weren't sure about, and researched several myself, and divvied up the rest among those people whose lunch hours I show up in my as-yet-undelivered pants to cover; and by the end of the day I was able to fire off a document with expert diacritical markings indicating the exact, correct pronunciation of each of those place names.

So overall I am pretty pleased with the work I did today, even though it meant that nothing I was actually supposed to work on today got done. Oh well. Monday is another day. Maybe by then my pants will come in.

On the Scene

Generally speaking, you go to the gay bar for people-watching. You don't go to dance - or you could; but the set I hang with rarely does. You're not there for the music, with generic song after song after song underlaid by an unchanging heavy bass beat. You're not there for conversation: man, it's so loud in here! And you certainly aren't there for the elbow room. After about an hour and a half I start having difficulty breathing, but unfortunately I still have to fight my way to the thronged bar to close out my tab. Twenty minutes of pushing forward until I can get the attention of a bartender, and he tells me the guy down at the other hand has my tab, go stand down there.

Like hell I will. But, for future reference, you should always pay cash at the gay bar. Those bartenders are some snippy little bitches.

But people to watch there are, lots of them, all kinds. My set consists of highly attractive, fit, healthy, well-groomed, courtly young men who introduce me to everybody and smell really nice. Still they have no mercy for many others in the crowd: the lesbians and the drag queens fare especially badly.

I chime in, because a few giggling college girls are trying out the pole in the cage in the corner, and they really don't know what they're doing: they're drunk, self-conscious and overcompensating for it, with no fluidity or sensuality to their movements. My friends follow my cue and shake their heads and cluck disapprovingly. "Amateurs," we say to one another.

They can't dance for shit, but they're very pretty. Straight men would probably be a bit more charitable.

Also on the scene is a solemn-looking older gentleman, pairing a neat Stetson, suit jacket, perfectly ironed dress shirt and tie with a flirty little black chiffon skirt. It's a bold look; I couldn't really decide if he was pulling it off or not. Then again, nobody bats an eye at spiked neon hair, extensive tats, or multiple face piercings; if you're going to be nonconformist, it seems silly to be conformist about it.

There was a trio of muscular, shirtless Miller Chill boys passing out free samples and Mardi Gras beads. I was bemused. I didn't get a chance to find out if they were passionate about their product, because no one near me told them it tasted like lime-infused swill. But they weren't working the crowd at all; they seemed a little overwhelmed, and kept mostly to the corner behind the pool table. "I bet they're straight," muttered one of my companions in disgust.

But not long after that, the oxygen started to run out and I had to go, get out, NOW; hugging my friends goodbye, walking outside into the wonderful free air, and making room for the next person in the line that now snaked around the block; for the next aromatic hottie or heavily-made up drag queen or cheerful fag hag or tipsy novelty-seeker to go in and be part of that glittering throng.

Hope they like swill.

The Dissipated Life

The thing I don't like about beer, aside from the taste, is that it makes me hiccup. This is embarrassing for two reasons. 1, everyone thinks I'm drunk; and 2, they're probably right.

We were sitting poolside last night in a chatty group, including a charming and amusing Englishwoman, who suggested the age-old cure of startling the hiccups away. "Tell me, Elizabeth," she said brightly, "do you like it up the arse?"

Someone spat out a mouthful of beer. I glanced at my companion. "Funny you should ask," I said. "NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Everybody laughed. I hiccupped. My friend suggested hopefully that I try switching to vodka shots. Shortly afterwards, the charming and amusing Englishwoman gave him her number.

I knew I should have just gone straight home after work.

No Sense of Humor

Yesterday after work I went to a happy hour I was invited to by a woman I'm slightly acquainted with in the office. She seems nice enough. She's invited me to several happy hours and, for one reason or another - couldn't find parking one time, or didn't feel up to it, or something else came up - I've never gone. But yesterday's was at Doc's on South Congress, close to work and close to home, and I had nothing else going on. So at 5 I biked on over and joined the group.

It turned out that, besides this woman, there was only one person I knew slightly from work, and he's kind of a weird creepy guy, with a soft voice and sticky eyes. Once a few months ago he showed up at a work-sponsored blood drive while I was lying on the table, and he picked the table adjacent to mine, and lay down with the top of his head so close to the top of my head that I could feel warmth coming off him. I was a little creeped out. I didn't really want to hang with this guy at happy hour.

Everyone else there was family of this woman, who happens to be Hispanic. They were friendly, but she had two rather obnoxious male cousins, who made lots of stupid jokes, and actually shouted at a couple of women passing by on the sidewalk - which the women in the group seemed to think was pretty funny. I don't think I've ever been a member of a group that did that before! Still, they seemed very pleased with themselves. "Hey, Madonna! Madonna!" they yelled after a girl who walked by in a white lace dress and cowboy boots. The woman who had invited me was in the bathroom, but when she got back, they told her what they had done. She laughed. "You guys are just crazy," she said affectionately.

I was working pretty hard on my second beer, kind of anxious to finish it and get home, when the cousin sitting across from me waved and called out to his cousin across the bar, sticking his arm straight out. "Hey, it looks like the Nazi wave," he said, laughing. "Hey, Joe! Joe! Heil!"

He turned to me, still laughing, this guy I've never even met before. "So do they do that a lot in your family?"

. . .

"Not really," I said, not smiling, and I closed out my tab and said my goodbyes ("Why are you leaving so early?" the woman I work with asked) and left. Remind me not to go to any more happy hours with these people. But perhaps she won't invite me anymore anyway. Clearly I can't take a joke.

Two Stories

The company I used to work for in Austin is gradually shutting down. They've transferred a bunch of people to another state and laid a lot more off. But they're not closing down altogether, and my former manager, through the departure of several others at his level, has gained a great deal more power, prestige, and influence.

This is his story.

Twelve years or so ago, my supervisor left the company to work for an independent consultant, so her boss, the division director, set out to hire a replacement. She posted the position, screened applications, and conducted interviews. When she had narrowed her choices down to four or five people - all internal candidates - she called a staff meeting to get everyone's input as to which one would be the best fit for our group. One of us - a good friend of mine - was traveling that week, so he was piped in by speakerphone. The rest of us sat around the conference table and discussed the applicants as our director reviewed their qualifications, projecting each one's badge photo on the screen at the end of the room.

None of us really knew any of the candidates, but when the director got to a particular one, my friend on the speakerphone piped up. "Oh, I've worked with him before!" he said. "He's very good, knows his stuff, and he's a really nice guy. I think he'd be great for the job!"

"What do the rest of you think?" asked the director, but we all shrugged. We knew his name and his face - it was a small enough company, no one would have been completely unfamiliar - but we didn't know anything about him. Still, if our coworker could recommend him so strongly, we certainly had no objection. So he was hired.

Several months later, my friend and I were at lunch. "Do you know," he told me, "that day when we had that meeting and decided to hire Bob? Well, I thought she was talking about somebody else."

This is my friend's story.

We were working a conference out of town, and at the end of a long day, we hung out on his hotel room balcony drinking Coronas and talking. After it got dark we went inside and watched Austin Powers on TV. My friend leaned back on one bed, and I lay on my stomach on the other. And after a while, Coronas being Coronas, you know, he got up to use the restroom.

And left the door open.

"Oh dear," I remember thinking at the time, "this can't be good," though at least the bathroom was around the corner, and not in direct line of sight. Still, when he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, it turned out I was right. Though I don't mean to complain, because it could have been much worse. He did have on underwear.

"Well!" I said brightly, "just look at the time." Or something like that. The next time I saw him back at the office, a week or so later, he apologized, and said he hoped he hadn't made me uncomfortable, and I said oh no, really, no big deal, don't worry about it. And that was that. But our friendship was never really quite the same, and fizzled out pretty shortly thereafter.

I think the moral of both of these stories is that life is random, unpredictable, and weird, so always be sure you have on clean underwear.

Cosmic Harmony

Since we can't have the snake guy, I've been told to come up with a new topic for our December safety information session.

And I’m thinking: you know what? These sessions always deal with immediate physical safety: don’t fall into the path of oncoming 18-wheelers, don’t drink and drive, don’t spray yourself in the eye with caustic chemicals, don’t nap on the railroad tracks, don’t jump up and down on the roof waving a tire iron and screaming insults at the gods during an electrical storm, etc. etc. etc. And pretty much every topic has been covered multiple times already. But how much attention do we pay to the long-term, life- AND quality-of-life-threatening hazards of being out of harmony with our own selves and the world around us?

Except for my small work group, the people who attend these monthly safety sessions are all construction site inspectors and maintenance workers. They are grizzled. They chew tobacco. These guys wear steel-toed boots every day, not to mention belt buckles that cover more territory than some of my skirts. They purchase inner tranquility by the six-pack. I bet most of them can’t even spell “yoga.”

They need my help.

For the December session, I’d like to get someone to come in and speak on the importance of achieving personal balance with the cosmos. This person will dim the lights, put on a little Enya, burn incense, and talk in a gentle, sing-song voice about how to deal holistically with the challenges of day-to-day life. She or he might demonstrate some meditation and breathing techniques, and should also touch on the role of diet in your spiritual, as well as physical health; and how you should only eat local, organic, ethically produced foods.*

Achieving peace in one’s interpersonal relationships is also vitally important to a healthy psyche. Our speaker will give some tips for resolving conflict without violence, shouting, sulking, or withholding sex; and for responding sensitively – while not submissively – to the demands of one’s bosses and coworkers, friends and loved ones.

Our monthly safety meetings often have some freebies for everyone to take home. I’m thinking aromatherapy votives and lavender-scented eye pillows, here.

It’s perfect, don’t you think? Because not only will the session be of great service to the attendees, on a topic that hasn’t already been covered 800 million times, but it’s almost guaranteed that I will never be asked to plan one of these goddamn safety meetings again.

And the balance of the universe is thus restored.

---------------------
*Except Smarties™

As Brittle As It Is Beautiful

"Floozies are friendly for free," I explained to the two guys sitting on either side of me on the sidewalk in front of L_M_N_L last night, red plastic cups of cheap beer in our hands. "Whores cost you more."

You know the evening's going downhill when you start popping out mnemonic devices about prostitution.

I was too tired for much conversation. Eric had played his first gig earlier at Club 115. He mixes electronic music, and as far as live performance goes it doesn't look very interesting, since it's just him standing there with a laptop. So he brought his cousin, Little Morgan (about 6'4" and 225 pounds), to sit on stage next to him, draped in an American flag and eating three Big Macs stacked together into one hellish sandwich.

But this wasn't quite enough visual interest, Eric felt, to hold the audience's attention. He wanted people to dance. What's a loving mother to do? I danced, and so did Margie. The laptop didn't need any further attention, so Eric and a friend of his danced as well. I thought the activity on the dance floor made a nice contrast to the gluttony being showcased on stage, but felt we all should have been draped in flags. I think I still have a Scottish one, packed up in a box somewhere. I don't know what Scotsmen look like when dancing to electronica, but I bet they do the White Guy Bite.

And at the end of about a one-hour set, Little Morgan finished the last bite of his burger. We stopped dancing and cheered. The onlookers cheered. Somebody held up a lighter.

When Eric's show was over, Margie and I walked over to L_M_N_L for her friend's art opening. The space has been gutted of all the steps, levels, cubbyholes and platforms that the guys built last year, and looks rather stark: it's only a small, high-ceilinged room after all. I hope they build something else. It's kind of sad. So I spent most of the evening outside with the smokers. Why do all those bohemian artsy types have to smoke? Some of them could really use a shower, too.

I got up and went upstairs to the print shop to use the bathroom, and when I came back down, I found one of the two guys - who hadn't noticed my return - whispering at length to the other, who was looking hard at me, a knowing smile on his face.

There is a little bit of a story there, and I won't tell it. But I definitely don't have enough fun to deserve a reputation. I went home.

How the Other Half Lives

Leaning on the railing of a balcony overlooking the pool and yard of a multi-million-dollar Westlake Hills mansion yesterday evening, I realized that Austin has an aristocracy. And the people who keep Austin weird aren't hippies, or garage band members, or Chronicle staffers, or art car drivers, or even, say, Leslie. Not that these people don't do a lot. But they're labor, not management. Without the blessings, programs, and campaigns of the moneyed ruling classes, all these feathers in the weird Austin cap would be just so much underground-movement riffraff.

"How do you know Scott?" I was asked several times over the course of yesterday evening. "Oh, he represented my sister's ex-boyfriend on a DWI charge," I didn't say.

The full story is that the band Margie's in plays at parties for Scott, who really is an extremely nice guy - certainly he has at least 300 close friends - as payment in kind for his services. The upper classes can be indulgent: certainly he had no difficulty affording a "real" band, an excellent professional bluesy roadhouse combo whose name I didn't catch. Teddy and Marge are not such a band. They typically play for exposure, not money, in any case.

There were two kegs of good beer by the front door, two more on the back patio, and a third pair at a drink station in the yard. There was a full bar in the wood-paneled den, better stocked than some restaurant bars I've seen. There were margarita machines and limitless bottles of wine. So Scott, being as I've mentioned a DWI attorney, rented out the parking lot of the nearby high school and hired a fleet of golf carts to shuttle guests back and forth from his house all night. Guests who had too much to drink could then easily be prevented from leaving.

Margie's ex-boyfriend, Bill, befriended Kay over barbecue. She's from Dallas and took an instant dislike to him. "How did you come to be here," she asked, "did you find a flyer on the street somewhere?"

I have never liked Dallas.

But Bill, who works for Waterloo, has been respectably outfitting Scott with vinyl for years, apparently. Scott is a connoisseur, and has a small room just off the entrance hall dedicated to his record collection. Bill is too good-natured to bristle. Kay became friendlier, asking how she might best dispose of her ex-husband's record collection, which she doesn't know anything about, except that he had loved it and supposedly had several rare and valuable items in it.

"Why did you get it, then?" Bill inquired.

Kay laughed. "Oh, I got everything!" she said. "Except the dog."

After we had eaten, Teddy and Marge relieved the roadhouse combo to do a set by the pool. I was apprehensive. "This is not the right scene," I whispered to Bill. "These people are going to hate this."

He laughed. "It doesn't matter," he told me.

We were both right, though at least Scott said he enjoyed the set. I did, too. And the aristocracy of Austin is too well-bred to be openly hostile. Afterwards we tore down and loaded up the trailer, and Grady (that's the Teddy of Teddy and Marge) capped the show by stripping down and leaping, splay-legged, hooting and naked, into the pool. Nobody batted an eye. I don't think they expected anything less from someone who had just played what they had just listened to him playing.

With gratitude to our generous and indulgent host, then, we headed out to Clementine's to hear Grady's girlfriend Lauren play accordion with the Seas, which was totally awesome, then back to the little eastside art co-op where Bill lives.

Money's nice and all, but I think the riffraff have more fun.

On the Banks of the Guadalupe

The water is cold, even though it's approximately 800 million degrees out. (Fahrenheit, though, not Celsius.) Katie, Margie, Margie's friend Lauren, and I are sitting at the edge of the water, splashing ourselves, eew-eew-eewing at the river grasses, and exchanging greetings with passing tubers. Katie, Margie, and Lauren jump in and swim about now and again, but I don't trust my bikini top. There's a Knights of Columbus fundraiser going on at the opposite bank, so a bad band is playing religious music for our enlightenment. A few of the tubers (people in swimsuits and inflatable rafts, not root vegetables) join in with enthusiasm as they float by. "Oh I'm a friend to Gooooooooooooooood!" wails one.

Too far out to splash. Damn.

A guy comes up to us. "Hey, girls!" he says. It's hard to hear him over the dreadful music. "I'm taking a break right now. Do y'all want to play with my (word I couldn't possibly have heard correctly)?"

We look at him and each other. We're all rather taken aback. "Uh, no, thank you?" we venture.

"I'll put it in the water for you, if you like," he says.

He gestures towards his kayak (Kayak! Ohhhhh!) sitting on the bank behind us.

Did you know that Pabst Blue Ribbon proclaims proudly on its cans that it was judged America's best beer in 1893? Perhaps traditionalists are impressed by this, but I can't help wondering if there aren't maybe two or three more breweries in the U.S. than there were in the late nineteenth century. Especially once the beer starts to get warm.

It was a good day but I expect to be a bit tender tomorrow. My bikini top allowed the sun in places where it doesn't normally shine.

It's Mostly About the Beer

You know those winsome, leggy, skimpily clad, impersonally flirtatious girls that beer companies hire to walk around restaurants handing out free samples?

They don't put up with any shit.

My face-painting gig at Eeyore's was amazingly successful. I only made one little kid cry; and to be perfectly fair, she seemed as if she were about to cry before she sat down, and the whole time she was having her face painted, too. So I don't think it was really my fault, though I felt awful. Fortunately, everyone else seemed really happy with their paint job.

The best was a redheaded kid who knew exactly what he wanted - a red dragon and a black dragon, one on each cheek, facing one another, breathing great gouts of flame that united at the bridge of his nose and flowed up onto his forehead. I probably spent about a quarter of my two-hour shift on that one kid, and it turned out absolutely awesome, so I hope he doesn't wash his face for at least a week. One onlooker told me she wanted me to remember that design when she came back later in the afternoon. At another point, someone actually referred to me as an artist. It's wonderful what high-quality, independent, locally-brewed beer goggles can do.

We hung out for a few hours afterwards, listening to the bands and the drum circle, and just watching some of the freakiest, most beautiful, happiest people and dogs in the freakiest, most beautiful, happiest city on Earth pass by on the trail. It was a perfect day.

Later, Kevin, Robbie and I ended up at Hill's Cafe on South Congress, a fine example of retro-trendified nouveau-vieux, for a little après-Eeyore's gnosh, and met someone really passionate about her job.

Two girls were making the rounds of the place, pouring cups of Miller Chill (rhymes with "swill"), which I didn't try, but which Robbie and Kevin didn't care for, seeing as how we'd spent the day sampling a lot of really good beers. Fair enough, but unfortunately, a few minutes after pouring the samples, the girls stopped by again to ask if we liked it.

We all smiled and nodded politely. "Not really," said Robbie.

The girls laughed, but one didn't want to let that go by. "What didn't you like about it?" she asked.

"Well, it tastes like Miller," Kevin pointed out, reasonably enough I thought.

"Well, it's a whole different recipe," the girl said, still laughing, but with an edge to her voice. "I've never heard that one before."

"Well, now you have," Robbie responded.

The next logical step was for her to break a Miller Chill bottle on the edge of the table and go for his throat, but fortunately, they gave up and moved on, which is good, because by then I had a monster headache from all the sun, all the squinting at small children's faces, all the beer, and most of all the live country band playing at Hill's, which probably was not, in clear violation of the principle of truth-in-advertising, called "Quaver McWobbly and His Amazing Vibrato Squad."

Headache aside, it was a great time all around. I'm looking forward to volunteering again next year, and here's a tip for you if you ever sign up to do face-painting: Don't set your drink down on the table right next to your paintbrush water. You might as well just drink Miller Swill and be done with it.

It's a Fact!

Did you know...

...that Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale is almost as appetizing as the name implies?

...that, if I am locked out of my house, I can crawl in through the cat door?

...that St. Patrick's Day commemorates the driving out of Ireland of all the snakes by St. Patrick?

...that this in turn symbolizes the driving out of the indigenous pagan religions and the conversion of the country to Christianity, and that therefore I tend to take the snakes' side, and if you pinch me for not wearing green, you will be in terrible peril?

...that falling in love is one of the sillier things an otherwise rational person can do?

...that Anna has a wet butt because she went wading in the creek and fell down?

...that bicycle helmets, no matter how stylishly designed, brightly colored, and diligently worn by safety-minded cyclists, are nonetheless irretrievably uncool?

...that today is such a spectacularly nice day that the Dogfish Head, sipped on the back patio, tastes almost bearable?

Well, now you do.