Tipped Over

This weekend I partook of the eightiest eighties movie that ever eightied, Tron, which has aged to quite possibly the most accidentally hilarious movie ever made. It already had a good start with such solemn dialogue as “They haven’t yet made the circuit that can hold you,” but these days, large floating Arc d’Triomphes are not quite as terrifying as the director may have originally intended.

Tron received bonus points on its way up My Bigol Crap List for causing the following:

(What truly horrifies me about this--and there is much to be horrified by here--is that this guy is in a hotel room. Look at the door latch and the You're Going To Die Anyway fire exit directions tacked up to the side. This means that either 1) he walked out that door and wore this in public, in front of people or 2) he wore this to an extramarital affair. I wish to contemplate neither option.)

The many horrors of Tron was somewhat mitigated by Sideways, which was consumed with Flipper and the long-lost G-Force and Oogie. We have not seen each other as of late, largely because when we do things like this tend to occur,

and we are congnizent of our responsibility to the universe to deflect the gaping maws in the time-space continuum that our combined preseneces tend to create.

Alas, the avoidance of social disaster was… unavoidable. We watched Sideways. We not only watched Sideways, we did so while actually swirling wine (it was Australian, which meant we had to swirl counter-clockwise) and saying such things as “It’s very full-bodied. I sense a lavender essence; perhaps the ambient temperature was low at the harvest.” It was absolutely the most pretentious thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve attended a poetry reading in a renovated carriage house. We were disgusting and I hated us.

I am in no danger of such behavior while in the company of Josh the Pilot, who not only enjoys vintages from last week, he does so from the font of a cardboard box. And when the box gets low, he removes the plastic lining and continues to enjoy. I actually broke up with him for a minute and a half when I opened his refrigerator door one day and found Bag O’ Wine on the bottom shelf, but then I discovered that he also had cookies, so I took him back.

It has occurred to me that I am at-risk candidate for pretentiousness of epic proportions; I’m a writer, and a wine snob, and now a professor. It’s like having both parents and a full set of grandparents who are raging alcoholics. I need to play cornhole on a regular basis as a preventative measure.

Then things like Saturday night happen, which tend to mitigate the peril. It is rather difficult to affect class when one finds little ground-up bits of toothpick in one’s ice cream drink. (“I sense… a certain woodiness, with just a hint of congealed underage college student spit.”) So I got a Milky Way martini, and everybody sampled it, which I suspect runs counter to typical martini protocol, because you never saw Frank Sinatra all "Sammy, try this, try this, you totally can't taste the alcohol!"

The Rack, was, of course, a factor. “I’m afraid the I’m Taken tractor beam is on,” I said sadly as I turned down yet another marriage proposal because the gentleman suitor was unable to scrape together the forty-goat dowry requirement.

“It’s the Racktor Beam,” G-Force said. G-Force, who really does have an I’m Taken tractor beam, passed the evening attempting to duck a Dance Spazz who preferred to express his musicality via kickboxing.

The next day we had ice cream, because we are big girls who can have ice cream whenever we want. I had Birthday Cake, the main ingredient of which is cake batter. Cake batter. Because the sugar and the eggs and the more sugar aren’t enough. I believe the Flavor of the Month for August is Lard Ripple.

sugar cones are a must at: mb@blondechampagne.com