viragette

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a hip-hop show in Seattle. The club closed around 2 AM, and as I had not eaten dinner, I decided to buy a hot dog from the vendor outside. I was standing against the side of the club, watching the people, when I looked down to discover my hot-pink, platform flip-flop was smack in the middle of a sizable lake of mustard, complete with onion-bergs. Some earlier patron had dropped their dog. “Holy crap - I’m standing in a lake of mustard!”, I said. The young man standing next to me, also eating a hot dog, snorted at this articulation of my dilemma, and hence our conversation began.

Our names mean the same thing, his in Swahili, mine in French. He’s studying political science, and is particularly interested in the problems of globalization. We talked earnestly for 15 minutes before he asked if I was walking home, and offered to walk together to continue our discussion. “I’m driving, but I’ll give you a ride home, it’s on my way,” I said. A few minutes later, I pulled into the loading zone outside his building, shook his hand and wished him a nice life.

It was at this moment that he turned to me and said: “You seem like a very nice person. Would you like to come inside and have sex with me?”

What?

“Well, I appreciate your candor. I will be equally candid. I am just not interested in having sex with a stranger right now. Have a nice evening.” Indicating the door with a nod of my head.

“I understand. Perhaps you can give me your number? We could meet for coffee?”

“I think that the whole trying-to-get-in-my-pants theme would really interfere with our friendship. I don’t think so.”

“Oh. Well, have a nice evening.”

“Bye.”

The saga continues. This weekend, on my trip through Milwaukee, my traveling companions and I completely underestimated the power of PolishFest and a Twins-Brewers game. When it came time for us to find a hotel room on Saturday night, harassed desk clerks everywhere merely laughed feebly while answering 3 phones and beating off drunken baseball fans with a stick.

They weren’t the only ones. In no fewer than three hotel lobbies, my conversation with the front desk was punctuated by drunken men sidling up to me with tippy cups of Budweiser and offering me and “my girlfriends” a place in their room.

“I don’t let my girlfriends stay with strange men, sorry.”

We finally tired of driving from hotel to hotel, and I got sick of being accosted. We formed a desperate plan. At the next hotel, my friend’s husband had front-desk duties while I made a beeline across the lobby to the phones.

Some sort of African-American church convention was being held, and people throughout the lobby where decked out in splendid, brightly colored robes and hats. I started flipping through the yellow pages, while a pair of congregants stood nearby in thoughtful discussion.

And kept standing there. I was going to have to bite the bullet, time was a’wastin.

I grasped the entire ‘Hotels’ section firmly and started to carefully rip the pages out of the phonebook. They stopped their conversation to watch my progress. Once extracted, I folded the pages neatly, turned to smile warmly at them, and walked back out to the waiting car like a shameless phonebook page thief.

As I got back into the car, my friend’s husband said, “I can’t believe you did that right in front of those people.”

“Well, I just told them, [putting on my best officious voice] ‘It’s OK - I have a Ph.D.’”