the motherland, part III (or "you're welcome, from america")

It's New Year's Eve, about 9:45 p.m. We get half-price cover at Monkey Chews and our first round of drinks is delivered to us at the bar for free. It's a sign of things to come.

As the bar begins to fill up we notice a trend. The male population is leaning heavily toward my self-proclaimed type: white and nerdy. But even with all the candidates, I spot him immediately. My husband. My white and nerdy husband. He's got glasses and cute little curly hair and a snappy vest and he is just sodamncute.

Only, turns out? My husband was extremely drunk. Well, early on we thought he was really drunk and later learned that he'd only LOOKED drunk because he actually had an eye infection. (Sexy, I know.) So all the droopy-eyed crazy face round about 10 p.m. could be attributed to that, but then he did later make good on looking like a total drunk by becoming a total drunk.

Naturally you will not be surprised to learn that this did NOT stop me from grabbing his rear as he walked by and then acting like I was involved in a very deep yet also nonchalant conversation with Jenni, mostly about how it certainly was not I who grabbed his ass, no way, no how. He stood there staring for a second and actually pointed right at me, but eventually gave up and walked away. The handy thing about messing with drunks is that they have a limited attention span.

When we weren't eyeing men and discussing my husband (who, turns out, was friends with one of the bartenders and thus Sarah later learned that he had recently cleared the dance floor at a wedding to break dance, YES, break dance -- we were meant to be) we were in the queue for the ladies' room. Because there was a grand total of ONE toilet. For a packed NYE bar full of sequin-studded women with tiny bladders.

We made LOTS of friends in the queue, and at one stage even had drinks delivered to us while we were waiting. I'll never say the English lack customer service skills, never, never again. Once while I was in the queue by myself I started chatting to the girls in front of me, one of whom had a harrowing tale of being barfed on by a very tall man at a bar the night before and how the women in the ladies' room banded together to help her. They let her skip ahead and one of them even produced a trial size shampoo to wash her hair! It was fairly incredible. Only the whole time we were chatting, I was speaking with a British accent. I don't know! I was alone in the line and they were talking to me, it just happened SO SUE ME.

But next thing I know, we've been waiting together so effing long that they start asking questions. Like, where are you from? And where did you grow up? And oh, the lies. THE LIES. They came too easily, really. And in a twist of extreme irony, long about an hour after this I was up on a barstool singing loudly to "Don't Stop Believin'" and yelling in between verses, "You're welcome FROM AMERICA!" It is a wonder from God, Allah and all the saints themselves that I was not punched straight in my stupid American face. Repeatedly. By the girls from the queue.

Later, as we were heading home and I was shuffling slowly across the streets of London like a constipated former paraplegic, I had a conversation with our cab driver about cunnilingus (actually it was more like we were talking about it in the back seat and then he piped in that he had witnessed that very event in THIS VERY CAB which was simultaneously hysterical and a frightening point of contemplation about taxi cab sanitation) before trying and failing at purchasing prawn cocktail crisps from a sassy garage attendant.

The next morning I woke up with no memory of crashing, though I had crashed, and hard -- my clothes were in a Hansel and Gretel trail from the front door to the bedroom. Now that is a good New Year's.



cheers,
elizabeth