by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

Went to a birthday party last Saturday. It was very, very strange. First of all, the birthday girl was the very recently ex-girlfriend of a co-worker. The split had occurred after we had all accepted the invitation to the party...which was being thrown, in fact, mostly by the "dump-ee". The coworker earnestly requested that we (the invitees from work) please still come as she needed our presence to get through the night. Fine. There was going to be a good contingent from the store so we could all hang out, drink free booze, eat free food, do some dancing (the event was being held in the local dance hall). However, when we arrived, things weren't quite like I imagined.

Actually, I had thought since they had hired the Indigo Ballroom for the night, that we would have the chance to do some ballroom dancing. Fat chance! The music was loud, electronic and insistent. The two DJs cranked it up from the start and never wound down for a breather. I have to admit that I am confused by all the various categories music has these days. "Hard House", "Industrial", "Trance", "Techno"...all I know is that the beat was king and it was relentless. I seem to remember dances sort of moved in waves; slow moving up to fast and then winding back down to slow and then back up again and so on for the evening. I guess that was then and this is now. So, the short story is that there was no ballroom dancing that night.

The "open bar" consisted of beer, a cheap vodka and some sort of fruit schnapps. I made do with vodka and 7-up, and I drank enough to get to a point where the music actually started to sound...OK. The food was also OK...not great but, on the other hand, not inedible. I ate enough to be able to convince myself that a couple more vodka and 7-ups were OK. Besides, I only had to drive 6 blocks to get home. (Aside: Actually, I stopped drinking over an hour before we left, so I'm pretty sure that I would have passed a breath test. I'm pretty careful about that. Whereas, in my reckless youth--when the roads were far less crowded--I was known to, once or twice, get behind the wheel in a less than sober state, I now regret those youthful idiocies and would never, never attempt to drive if I felt that I was even close to being a danger. end aside.)

But the high point of the night came about 9pm when this vision in blue chiffon swept into the room. Yes, gentle readers, the entertainment for the evening was not the traditional lady jumping out of a cake. No, it was a drag queen in full dress doing...sigh...her act for us. For a good 10-15 minutes she worked the crowd while lip-synching to her pre-recorded music set. Hell, "she" had a better body than most of the women in attendance. And she did put on one hell of a show. All in all, Empress whats-her-name made the whole evening memorable and very worthwhile. My better-half and I left at about 10:45 because it was daylight savings time spring-ahead night and she was not going to loose more than one hour's sleep!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005