Slap & Tickle

Merry Cinco de Mayo!

I haven’t written in a while… not sure why. I’ve been busy at work, but my social life is such that it has not prevented me from writing. I guess I’m just lazy…

I had friends over for brunch on Sunday. It’s the first time I’ve cooked brunch. I’ve had many dinner parties and luncheons for events like the Oscars, or the Superbowl, but never brunch.

It was not my finest hour.

Let me just say that breakfast requires a lot of work for not a lot of yield. Bacon, for example requires the clearing of several national forests in order to provide enough paper towels to soak up the fat and grease. And when one has finished cooking up an entire pound of bacon, there are about two teeny-tiny strips sitting there… charred beyond allrecognition.

Pancakes are just a god-damn mess from the start. Flour everywhere, egg shells surrounding you, buttermilk smelling anything but tasty, and the result of this mess are these strange, thin, wrinkled things that look nothing like mom or IHOP would ever hope to serve.

And don’t get me started on quiches. I made two quiches, one regular and one with salsa (for Cinco de Mayo). A huge mess to make, it sloshes EVERYWHERE as I tried to put it in the oven… naturally, the sides of the oven, covered in egg, began to flame as the cooking time went on… and on… and on… As I was standing by the oven bitching about the damn things not cooking right, my sister looked at me and said, “I would have just bought a ready-made one at the store.” Now she tells me…

It was a good learning experience. I learned that I will never do this again. I figure with the amount of time I spent cleaning the place (both before and after—including repainting of the kitchen, plus the purchase of a new oven), cooking, and groceries, the party cost me about $1.4 million. I should be catering to the government.

Okay, it probably wasn’t that much… but it sure f’ing felt like it.

Putting the disaster behind us, in the afternoon we went to The Saratoga Art & Wine Festival. Or should I call it “The Saratoga Terribly Bad Art and Where the Hell is the Wine and is it Too Much Trouble to Have Some Bottled Water on a Really Hot Day? Festival.” Being that it was held on Cinco de Mayo in Saratoga, there was absolutely nothing to indicate the date. Hot dogs, pizza and beer for sale. I don’t know what happened to the wine or water, but lordy, it wasn’t to be found there.

I never knew there were so many talented artists in the area. And I never suspected they were out numbered 10 to one by painfully bad ones. One woman commented on an artist’s particularly horrific group of paintings, “He’s gone through a lot of trial and error.” To which Jill replied, “A LOT of trial and WAY TOO MUCH error.” We found it amusing, the lady did not.

We decided we needed a “key word” to describe the crappy art. We felt it was far too rude to yell out, “Holy God! My eyes! Please God, someone scratch out my eyes!” Instead, we came up with “extraordinary!” Whenever we saw something particularly heinous, we would say, “My, isn’t that extraordinary!”

This worked for a while until we loudly extraordinary-ed a particularly ugly “art-deco” group of night-lights and Laura, standing directly in front of the artist said, “Actually, I kind of like them.” I later had to explain to Laura that we were trying not to insult the artist to their face, rather to mock them maliciously behind their back.

We eventually decided “Fantastic” was to be used whenever one liked something that someone else thought was “extraordinary.” Which worked fine until we walked up to macramé plant holders (my heavens, they made it back after a scant 25 year absence) and I said they were “extraordinary.” Laura looked at them and smiled, “my mom used to do these, I think their fantastic… on second thought, they are kinda ugly… I guess they are pretty extraordinary…”

I just stood there amongst the large group of sellers that we all had made a point of saying how their work was “extraordinary.” The artistically challenged all seemed to turn at once, recognizing that they had not only been duped into thinking we actually liked the crap they called art, but were openly mocking them.

The moved en masse upon us.

Laura tried to explain to them that it was a joke… We never saw her again. She’s probably okay, but, chickenshits that we are, we booked it out of there. I got caught up in some “Authentic Indian Dream Catchers” sold by a woman so white and pale, that the closest thing to her being Indian was that she owned Dances With Wolves. Eventually, I freed myself from the nightmares about me and ran until I could run no more… which was a Starbucks across the street and around the corner (passing two on the way).

Scott tripped over rocks that had metal items drilled into them to look like birds. He has a very odd dent in his forehead. I kept telling him to put his thumb in his mouth and blow real hard and maybe his head would right itself.

Jill, being the smartest of the bunch just bought some crappy macramé vest, put it on and walked through the melee without a care in the world.

Of course she’s now stuck with it.

As we sat in Starbucks, nursing our wounds, a woman walked up to us and said, “You guys look like you’ve had a pretty wild day.”

“We must look pretty silly,” Jill smiled, wearing the ugliest macramé vest in the world, while I sweated profusely from my run and Scott kept puffing away on his thumb, trying to get his head to pop back into shape.

“No,” smiled the woman as she turned to walk out, “you all look extraordinary.”