It was a bad Monday night, but it was about to get better. I had attended a Sierra Singles potluck with hope in my sweet, tender heart that it would at least be better than the Parents Without Partners fiestas Commie Mom was always trying to shove past my gag reflex.
Hikers! Yee! Images of couples coupling anonymously in the wilderness, like Jean Jacques Rousseau—but without the diaper and weird bathrobe!
But everyone was 60, except the women, who were mid-40s, makeupless, and drowning in shy and lonely despair. In what was not my finest hour, I pretended to go out to the car for something and never came back. I didn't even act like I had somewhere else I had to be.
I called my sister. Marine Room Tavern? Okay! While I waited (and waited) for Sarah, the kid next to me explained that he knew a ton about chicks, and to prove it, he talked about himself for 20 minutes. While most chicks dig that, I was, for some reason, ready to crush his windpipe like an evil ninja. But here's when the happy thing happened! A guy came in from the cold. “Serious diarrhea of the mouth going on out there,” he sniped to the handsome, Clark Kent-ish bartender (who, apparently unaware that bartenders are by law my personal playground, declined my invitation to hit on me). The tall, gorgeous brunette with whom the guy had been smoking leaned her whole body in the window and bellowed, “You've got diarrhea . . . OF THE BUTT!”
I could have danced all night.
Tuesday, I ate myself silly at a night for local concierges at Laguna Beach's seven degrees. There wasn't much more to it than that, except that by attending, I was able to swap salmon-salad recipes with a nice young man from the Sundried Tomatoand miss completely the president's press conference. This was good, as it annoys me ferociously when people lie to my face (you wouldn't like me when I'm annoyed), and I was also afraid that like my adulterous lover John Ashcroft before him, the president might use task as a verb. Task yourself back under those covers, Jack!
Wednesday, I saw art. (See Art!)
Thursday, we gathered up a girl gang comprising my coworkers Sharla, Tenaya, Stephanieand Sarah, with whom the only time I have any truck at all (as they are all in advertising) is when they are tasking me a sandwich!
And you know what? They were one hell of a girl gang! All even prettier than I am and not afraid to knock down all and sundry when fleeing in heels from the Pierce Brosnan/Julianne Moorevehicular manslaughter that had been Laws of Attraction (which kicked off the Newport Beach Film Fest), they arrived at the Newport Radisson for the film festival's gala and went on a recon mission for the bar like they were the 101st Airborne. Go! Go! Go! Go!
As Sarah stalked the Salad Guy and Sharla fended off her many new friends, I was left to ruminate on the many, many things Laws of Attraction wanted us to believe. It was a cute film and often very funny, but there was just no getting past the idiotic idea that Pierce Brosnan waits a good couple of years for Julianne Moore to stop being so frickin' icy and uptight and all around unpleasant, and in the meantime, he never gets snatched up by anyone else. In New York City. And the usually lustrous Moore is shot pastily. I was getting dizzy trying to sort it out. More bar!Go! Go! Go! Go!
The moral of the following story is that you shouldn't do any of the fine things I tell you to do in Eight Days. For instance? Don't go to the Magnaflow Car Show Saturday, and certainly don't go see The Wiggles. You can, however, go shake it to Southern Culture on the Skids—just don't think you'll be finding love amid the Bryl Creem.
Despite Monday's granola fiasco, I headed Friday to KCRW Night at the Orange County Museum of Art. Was vaguely liberal cruising going on? It was not! People came with dates! And when they flew solo, they were still too shy to talk to anybody they didn't know and stood on the front patio talking into their anti-cancer cell phone headsets. That is the opposite of cruising! Yes, Nic Harcourt was there, but he didn't seem to be spinning, as he was talking to the museum's director, Dennis Szakacs, nowhere near the turntables but very near Anton Segerstrom, or, as we like to call him, The Little Bean Farmer Who Could.
Still, people got to cluster in front of the giant Warhol (of Mick Jagger, no less) in the atrium and probably felt quite pleased with themselves. Me, I rambled at a KCRW exec for 20 minutes about how just that day it had been suggested I should be the station's new Sandra Tsing Loh except that I probably wasn't self-indulgent enough. (If you really must hear once again about how Tsing Loh got shitcanned, kindly look up the gentle murmurs on Cathy Seipp's blog. I am entirely over it.) While most radio execs dig that, he finally excused himself and left despite the fact that I was looking like Mischa Barton at the top of her game, except old and squat and kind of pale and replete with some dykey housewife hair. Like I said: smoking. All the way home, I formulated self-indulgent KCRW commentaries in my eternally sunshiney mind. Trust me: they were hilarious. Also? They were about me. Ruth Seymour? Let's task lunch!
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