Saturday night began innocently enough, with five friends meeting for dinner at Mexico Lindo in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan to celebrate an impending birthday.
The friends, in order, are me (managing to look extra-crazed because I specifically tried to look normal), Sonya (in her authentic American Indian headdress), Jack (who is not as perverted as he appears), Beth (the birthday girl and owner of many granny sweaters), and Emily (who arrived twenty minutes late due to hair-straightening needs, which was generally deemed very worthwhile).
Not pictured: Bridgette, who stopped by for twenty minutes before returning to her GMAT studying and who DID sit beside me, lest you judge me uncool for having an empty seat next to me in the photo above.
Dinner, which was scheduled to last two hours to lead up to a showing of The Reader at the theatre across the street, actually lasted four hours due to extensive talk of how best to hide your tampon on your way to the public restroom at work (up the sleeve was eventually decided upon), whether it’s okay or not to pile trash on your friend when he falls asleep during karaoke (perfectly okay), and why Emily’s sister-in-law would buy her a shirt with a scoopneck that shows off ¾ of her boobs (because those things deserve to be enjoyed by all). The waitress brought out a giant bowl full of flambéed pears with a candle on top for Beth to blow out, but the pears were actually the dessert I ordered, because of course restaurants in New York City don’t give you anything complimentary on your birthday. Beth drank her coffee in silence as I licked every last flaming inch of the bowl myself.
After Sonya took it upon herself to explain what Two Girls One Cup is to me and we debated the feces’ similarity to chocolate softserve, the four of us girls piled into the back seat of a cab
and made Jack sit up front while we unabashedly discussed how you have to consciously remind yourself to look at the penises instead of the faces at Naked Boys Singing because you’re trained to be a good girl, and how totally hilarious it would be to hand over a tampon right out of your vagina when your friend asks to borrow one. “It’s only been in there an hour; it should be good as new!” Sonya said.
Having missed the movie, we got a private room at our favourite karaoke spot instead and spent the hours leading up until 3 a.m. enduring Sonya’s renditions of O-Town and the Spice Girls, Jack pretending like he was badass enough to know the lyrics to KISS’s Love Gun, and sadly realizing that only listening to male-fronted bands all my life means that I don’t actually know any songs in my vocal range as I really let Weezer down with my Say It Ain’t So.
Luckily, Emily and Sonya more than made up for it with some super-sexy Melissa-Etheridge-inspired lesbian dealings that would’ve been much sexier had they been in focus
and Beth–literally the whitest person I know–sang not one not two but THREE rap songs. One of which involved saying the word nigger over and over again, causing crowds of people to peek in the window into our room to see whose ass they should kick.
And all of this while we were completely sober.
