Holiday Party
Part I
The Trek
I left work earlier than usual last Friday so I could get to Megan's holiday party on time. Megan's work was throwing their annual holiday party in a Milwaukee restaurant and I, as "guest," was chafing under the awesome responsibility bestowed upon me. The day before, I had been giddily looking forward to an evening of detached judging, mental note-taking, and free food eating, but as the time of departure approached, I found myself growing anxious about the impression I might make on people. Would I, wearing slacks and a common sweater (but not a sleek holiday dress with matching earrings) deepen Megan's reputation as a lax dresser? Would I falter under the conversational strain of Megan's uber-intense boss, who had apparently "scared" Taya when they interacted in the workplace? As the tension built up in my brain, I realized that my stomach and lower intestines were the body parts actually bearing the brunt of my struggle. Four blocks from my office and one block from the bus stop, I ducked into the enormous Office Depot(c) and took refuge in anonymous restroom time. Fifteen or twenty humiliating minutes later, I darted up the escalator and ran to the bus stop, where, as my fifth sense had correctly detected, the bus to Milwaukee was approaching.
Megan was slated to get on the same bus as me further into the route. Sure enough, only minutes before our stop approached, a fuzzy hat and skirt-clad Megan stepped on board. "So," she asked skeptically, "we're supposed to get off this bus in 3 minutes? Does that seem right to you?" The bus driver, who had already won my heart with her chummy conversation with a cyclist earlier in the ride, soon called out our stop "SE 26th and McGloughlin!" and wished us to "be safe out there."
The bus rolled off. Silence. Our eyes warily scanned the dark forest flanking either side of what appeared to be a busy highway to nowhere. "Oh man," lamented Megan, "is this really our stop?" "Err..uhhh," I concurred, with equally helpless confusion. "Excuse me," Megan said, turning to the teeny bopper to our right, the only other passenger who had chosen to join us in this no man's land. "Do you know where Amadeus Restaurant is from here? We know that it's on 22nd and Sparrow." "Hmm," said the teeny bopper, only half-thinking about the question, but fully sizing-up our sorry predicament, "I don't know where that is, but you shouldn't have gotten off at this stop. There's nothing 'round here." "See that," she said, pointing toward a shadowy cluster of trees and bushes, "that's all residential. There isn't any restaurant 'round here." Megan continued her inquiry, seeking out last ditch specifics. I chimed in with a couple point of clarification questions. "You shouldn't have gotten off at this stop," she scolded again before running past a first lane of traffic. "Gotta check for cross streets; next time check for cross streets!" she shouted back at us maternally and futilely as she disappeared into the night. "If there isn't anything out here, then where the hell did she go?" I wondered aloud. We gazed into the blank night. "That's a good point," answered Megan.
Our disapproving guide had pointed us in a plausibly correct direction; the otherwise worthless Tri-Met printout had instructed us to go west. Unfortunately, thirty seconds after our fellow bus rider had vanished into thin air, Megan and I were disagreeing on where exactly the girl had been pointing when she was saying which way west was (Ed. Note: Megan turned out to be 100% correct). We took Megan's route, and after treking past a bus stop for the bus we had just been on, we approached a lit intersection.
Our first task was to run across the street to the 7-11, where the employee inside revealed that he couldn't tell us which way to go because he wasn't from around here. Thankfully, he didn't keep trying to help us find our way for too long after that crucial piece of information about his shoddy location-finding qualifications had been revealed. We were starting to get worried about being too late for the party. The time "6:00 p.m." had been engraved on the email dinner invitations, but Megan had discovered through passive eaves-dropping in her office breakroom that arriving this early would result in a lengthy, awkward waiting period. But now, we feared that "fashionably late" would turn into "shamefully tardy."
We did know that, at a minimum, we had to get from 26th to 22nd street. After some hope-filled scurrying, we found that the street above 26th was 27th Place and the street below was 27th Avenue. "Nooooo!" I cried out at our Hitchcockian dillemma. But Megan, overcoming the pain in her high-heeled feet, charged us in a direction that turned out to be westward. Feeling our way toward the holiday cheer that filled us with such dread and with the assistance of two super helpful dudes standing outside a motel, we finally came across a sign: "Amadeus Restaurant." "Yay!!!" we cheered. Then we suppressed our levity to make room for the quiet determination needed to rapidly scale the winding road leading up to the castle-like establishment. Under cover of darkness, we made the final touch-ups to our new personages. Stray hairs were tucked; bright leg-warmers were removed; last giggles were expelled.
Once we went through the doors, I could tell that Megan and I had entered a world of elegance previously unknown to us. A white-haired lady sat at a baby grand. I wondered if she had been plucked straight from the church-organ circuit just to play for this hoity-toity gathering. Several chandelier-style light fixtures hung from the ceiling. Even nature had done itself up for the occasion--a formidably large pine cone, a maple leaf, and a walnut adorned the top face of the piano, each gilded in pure, 40 carat gold spray paint.
"We're with Concepts in Community Living," Megan announced professionally to the matre' d. He showed us down a flight of stairs into what had surely once been a medieval dungeon (it was freezing). A standing pool of perms and ties had collected down there. "There are a bunch of people who aren't even here yet," Megan whispered to me, "We came at the right time. If we would have gotten here at 5:57, we would have been screwed." I shuddered at the thought.
