This weekend saw another rare departure from my habitual policy of misanthropy, when I attended the bachelorette party of a friend. It involved dancing, and though I do dance (after fully surpassing the legal BAC limit for driving, that is), I came very close to chickening out and saying that I had other plans. Friend loyalty, and maybe some passing shame at such extremes of anti-socialness, won over. This is how I ended up on the dance floor of a popular Asian restaurant-by-day, ghetto club-by-night, wobbling back and forth in a miserable pretense at dancing, in front of the scrutinizing eyes of about twenty people, who just sat and watched and stared.
It might have been the wrong time to come in - our group of mostly awkward white girls, a nerdy black girl, and nerdy-as-well-as-awkward Asian girl, all outfitted in Hawaiian-themed attire, was the only group dancing, and all the seats and tables were arranged around us. No smiles; even laughter might have been somewhat appeasing at this point, anything but the semi-hostile stares. I don’t think it was poor timing so much as the wrong locale. Talk about fish out of water; we were pet goldfish flopping along the roadside in Death Valley, trying to hitch a ride to Vegas. Maybe it might have been fine even then, had there been better prices on drinks, but I was certainly not anywhere near drunk enough to achieve the blissful state of self-conscious-less-ness.
After the second frantic trip to the bar, and attempting to order drinks with names I could remember (I finally succeeded at getting an overpriced, badly mixed white Russian that mostly ended up on my skirt), I came back to find that all the sitting starers had gotten up and were now dancing. Good, that’s more like it! So I shuffled, somewhat-in-time, and stared back at them. Ha! It was then when I fully realized how much we stood out: none of us were wearing skin-tight dresses hiked up to crotch level, and none of us were physically capable of moving near the speeds of the slowest girl outside of our group. I tried not to stare at this one girl too much, because I didn’t want her to beat the skin off of me, but honestly, I was impressed: her booty moved like it was a hive of angry bees. (I’m not altogether sure that she would approve of this assessment, but I mean it as a compliment!)
Though I was impressed, the dowdy, germ-phobic grandma in me was disgusted by the way most couples danced together, in a convincing mimicry of anal sex on the dance floor. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the girls’ dresses were hiked up so high, and the guys’ pants hung so low, that they very well could be having anal sex on the dance floor right in front of us, and I just hadn’t noticed. I suddenly felt sorry for my old high school administrators.
In addition to the grinding on the dance floor (which did look painful, wouldn’t things chafe after an hour?), I spotted a pregnant woman leaning against a wall. By ‘pregnant’ I mean ‘water about to break,’ and she stood there, very dressed up and pretty, drink in hand. Oof. I hope it was juice. At first most of us reacted with indignation, but one of the others brought up the fact that this girl is probably still a teenager. She’s young, wants to have fun and feel pretty and everything that matters to teenage girls, and she doesn’t want to be left behind by her friends, so she goes and hangs out. Sounds fair. I still hope she was just drinking pineapple juice.
I ended up ducking out early with a couple of other girls who’d decided they weren’t having fun being fish out of water, bought some beer and hung out at one girl’s house for awhile. Her roommates ducked into their room rather hurriedly when we came in, so we took it over. We sat around, drinking and laughing at the whole evening previous to this point, when we saw what looked like a ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ DVD on the coffee table.
“Hey,” said one of them, as she picked up the DVD, “let’s watch Pi-” and started laughing. She showed us the back cover, to reveal that no, this was not the theatrical release of the Johnny Depp film. No indeed. Her roommates, a couple, had been watching this when we’d come in. “Ha ha, this is awesome. Let’s watch their PORNO!”
For half an hour, we tried to get the DVD player to work, or more accurately, figure out which button made the TV display the cheesy, fake-breasted pirate-themed porn stars in all their trampy glory. The girl who lived there actually knocked on her roommates’ door to ask them how to work the thing, and when he offered to stay and see if it worked, we all giggled and said no, go back to their business in the bedroom (uh huh).
It turned out to be a bouncy, dorky, softcore mash of the real Pirates of the Carribean, with a little Lord of the Rings and D&D in the mix. I think there was probably maybe two sex scenes in the whole thing, and they were both rather hilarious, with the Fabio-esque male actor making a face as though his anatomy were caught in a vice, and the bored owner of the booty, currently being plundered, looking as though if she’d be checking her watch if she were wearing one. Imagine the television series ‘Hercules,’ featuring Kevin Sorbo and his partners in theatrical crime naked in a couple of scenes, and maybe Lucy Lawless with balloons taped to her chest, and you’ll have a good idea of the well-acted, high-budget quality of this affair.
Afterwards, we went to pick up the other people who had stayed in the club, and I eventually got home later that night. I am staying there from now on!
