Screaming chihulys

We went out for dinner, Mr. Chemical Billy and me, that's Out for Dinner, to a fancy-eatin' place, not our usual fare, but a save-up-and-dress-up kind of Dinner Out. This because we also had tickets to a Play, so it was the whole show, dinner and a play, (where later we would meet an Armenian playwrite and his Russian travel agent wife, the playwrite disappointed in the American stage, but that's for another blogpost).

The restaurant - which was supposed to have some kind of a deal with the theater, so if you had tickets to the play, you got a break on the bill, which was attractive to us - suffered from an affliction we like to refer to as the "screaming chihulys", (best exemplified by the lobby at the Bellagio), though actual Chihuly sculptures are not required, the aspiration, the stench of chihuly is quite enough.

There is something about a place like this, I told Mr. C B after the host seated us at a tiny half-table in the waitstaff thoroughfare, that inspires rebellion in me, but I tried to keep it down, not to make a scene. I did try.

We looked around the room and saw acres of old white men in black suits, everywhere old white men in black suits, one or two glossed-up women but everything was about the old white men, and one might say we stuck out.

If you were there, had looked around the room at the OWM making their deals over dainty little plates of food, you would have stopped at Mr. & Mrs. Chemical Billy, Dressed Up to Go Out, bright colors where the OWM were white and black, laughing while the OWM chortled or scowled. You would have seen Chemical Billy reach for her scarf - they keep these places frigid - but the scarf had fallen to the floor, and under the chair, and Billy, rather than standing up to retrieve the scarf, keeps reaching for it, really an impossible contortion but she keeps at it, bravely, stupidly, the chair tipping, and you might have even seen her face, that half-second when she thought, "Fuck it," and let the chair go while she tumbles ass over head into the path of the oncoming waiter, who loses his own composure and cracks up.

It was worth it, just for that.

But the bastards, the poor, sad OWM, didn't crack a smile.