The Women's Epicurean Wallflower Social

Yes friends, I have found myself in that place, where there is no escape from the potluck and the store-bought stuffs, intended to encourage the bolstering of one’s ego and the demise of one’s hotplate. Here I am, a women’s social that is not the bar downtown, but has enough booze to require a liquor license surveillance on the residence that is hosting the event. Gals have gone so far as to purchase super special miniature quad Crock pots with bubbling Vienna sausages, beans with brown sugar, teriyaki dip, and some sort of brothy chicken soupy concoction in a creamy ooze, that has chives rolling along with the churn of the liquefaction from the excessive heat. A few have the cursory vegetable platter and ranch dressing or fruit and cheese plates, a few others brought the complimentary chips and tub of seven-layer guacamole dip. Of course, one character raided the KFC down the street, the smiling Colonel bulging with grease from the contents inside of the bucket. Ah, there is nothing like grease, yeast, and some kind of meaty beast to enjoy here tonight!

        I am trying desperately to avoid the booze but I wasn’t going to be that dyke who drags in a case of Pabst. I look both ways and make sure none of the women I want to talk to see me put the bottle of Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay behind the Colonel and far enough away from the cacophony of two, four, and multi-quart Crocks crammed on the counter in the hosting couple’s kitchen, so it doesn’t explode. As I turn, I almost take out the card table that is now the pastry pile. Everything from Danish to doughnuts to Black Forest Cake to chocolate chip cookies, to something way too French for me to pronounce, let alone ingest, is begging to be picked and dripped right down the front of any poor soul’s unsuspecting chin and expensive shirt without a napkin for prevention. Two steps out of the hole and I jerk to the right like a running back looking for daylight, as the cart filled with plates, silverware, and various glassware appears out of nowhere to impede my escape from the kitchen.

          I look up from the edge of the cart to the great room where nearly thirty women have congregated and see three unimpressed femmes trying to make heads or tails out of my clumsiness from the safety of the couch they have chosen as their fortress. I have no idea why femmes do that but it seems they have an immediate need to focus on the dork dyke with the pressed shirt and cowboy boots who rolled up on the motorcycle upfront and didn’t ask them for a ride. I think I found my dates for the night, lucky me! I grab a plate from the cart, demonstrate some semblance of etiquette and grace with a little bit of manners, as I lob the potato salad into the middle of the dish and stick a fork in it at a perfect ninety-degree angle. To look really cool, I use tongs to fish out a couple of the chicken legs from the now translucent bucket the Colonel no longer smiles from and grab a Smirnoff’s out of the ice bucket next to them. 

A quick toe under an Ottoman, as I drag it over to them, and a delicate placement of my own fast-food atrocity on the coffee table they have made as their personal edible altar, I feel I have redeemed myself to the degree it would at least warrant acknowledgement of my athletic abilities to some respect. Very quickly, one tucks her legs up under her skirt like a hen on her eggs, another shifts to pull herself as far away from me as possible but still maintain friendliness, the other drops her head in her hands and discreetly tries to call a friend on her phone. In baseball, since this is my first up at the plate, it’s not unusual to strike out the first time at bat. I haven’t even thrown out the first pitch and one of them is plotting to do the infamous, accidentally on purposely, cup of ice dump to escape. Okay, Plan B- nibble from the enormous mound of broccoli and cauliflower moldering on the table and dip a few pieces of what appears green into the now rancid something of a dressing to show that you are not entirely uncivilized.

Suddenly, the mother hen relaxes, as the friend she came in with has come to take the place of the woman who looked like the leaning Tower of Pisa on the far corner of the couch. Leaning woman rolls off the arm of the couch and as she stumbles away to find her tribe she came with tonight, the call girl announces she is meeting her ex outside and thanks me for sitting down with them this evening… uh, yeah, okay… Chicken leg to go, friend? Inside slider, that’s a nasty ball to throw, next to that cheese and nut thing sitting over by the lamp. It seems the company of people I wanted to get to know, all strangers, have gotten strange. I though this was a social, meet and greet without the games and the bar politics, the shades of imminent lover disasters on the dance floor. No, this is a house party of posers, like me, who think they are going to have a better score in a classier place that the bathroom at the club. One gal slithered off, one called for help, and the other has her wing woman to keep the weirdo from being friendly. Well, no need to sit here and watch the scene; the dining outside seems to have a little more breathing space.

I step out to the deck and find I am alone. I reassess what I am thinking and doing here tonight. It’s all madness, how hard can it be to accept that we came here to enjoy food and one another’s company as women of all walks? Too hard apparently, in my own jellified brain and pulsing reptilian concepts. I look up at the night sky with the moon coming up in the east, figuring out how long I may want to stay, when I felt a nudge to my left. I looked over and a woman I hadn’t noticed in the crowd came over and brought me the Smirnoff’s I hadn’t opened yet from the Kentucky Fried Femme Freak-Out disaster I just walked away from and left. She brought with her a plate of pinwheels made from tortilla wraps, prosciutto, provolone, romaine lettuce, and pimentos. I smile and thank her for bringing me the drink but I wasn’t going to enjoy it now. She smiled back, grabbed the bottle and dropped it into the trash can on the patio below us. 

I have no idea where the time went after that as we sat and ate those wraps and had an entire pitcher of ice water to ourselves.  She saw me before this evening, when I was on the DIGLIT bowling team at the alley down in Littleton. She wanted to talk to me but had no idea how to approach me. I hung out with a bunch of drag queens and she was confused, was I a bag hag, curious, or was I queer at all? I assured her I was a lesbian but the best damn sandbagger the team could ever want to keep their handicap in place. She smiled and played with the last wrap on the plate, slowly taking it apart. We were both running out of words and food to keep the conversation up. If we made eye contact, we had to look away, not sure if there was any other way to talk about things that didn’t involve bowling, food, or bad tastes in other people.

As everyone started to thin out, the Crock Pot parade had commenced and the begging and pleading to take food home was announced, I needed to go to the bathroom. I was about to burst from the water we were drinking all evening and the green stuff I had earlier with my three lovely but ridiculous dinner partners. I came out five minutes later and she was gone. My helmet was on the table and my jacket on the chair. At least the evening wasn’t spent with the Furies and their Table of Terrible Treats.  I didn’t walk around with nacho cheese somewhere on my shirt or pants, I didn’t do any drinking to confirm my idiocy, and above all, I did not eat that chicken or the potato salad that came with it. Someone shouted that there was a case of Pabst in the kitchen that needed to go and I smiled- not me! I put on my jacket and headed for the bike, getting the key out of my pocket, hoping for a number in there… no such luck. I get on the Suzuki and fire it up, pull the helmet on and I can’t see out of the face shield? I take off the helmet and written in the Chapstick I realize was missing from my other jacket pocket, she left me her number scrawled on the inside of the lens. I deal with the blur and head off for home as someone chases after me with the Kendall-Jackson I abandoned on the counter. I yell back to drop it from the deck to the trash can below, it will be more useful there, as I hit the throttle and take off into the summer night.