Oscar my Butt

I had an insane weekend.

On Friday, I picked my girlfriend up at the airport. She is also a Memphian, and I have no idea how we never met until an all girl's Vegas trip in January a couple of months ago, but when we met, we instantly clicked and decided that we might be twins who were separated at birth. She just happens to be about a foot taller than me and significantly tanner, but I believe that we could be twins, nonetheless. After I picked her up, we went to the promenade and hung out in Santa Monica for a little while. My buddy called me on Friday evening and invited us to Shabbat. This turned out to be a neat experience for my friend (well, me too, but I have done Shabbat before), because Memphis isn't just booming with Jewish folk, so she got to experience a completely different approach to Friday night festivities. We went over to my friend's house and were definitely the only WASPs present. Our fake bake, platinum hair, and inundation of "y'alls" made us stand out a bit [just a bit] from the brunette crowd. Talk about fantastic people. We had a wonderful experience, complete with hummus, brisket, and a lesson about Judaism. They even let us light the candles before they said Hebrew prayers. I have great friends.

After Shabbat, we headed over to my favorite spot, Cabo Cantina, and drank margaritas next to the fire pit. We were accosted by crazy people all night, which is typical, but makes for good stories. At one point, a fat, bald headed man with a beard came up to us and tried to pick a fight with some other goon with a puppet face, and in between making death threats, the fat man asked if any of us would like to buy a bike. I said that I needed one. Turns out, he buys bikes at police auctions, fixes them up, and then sells them. He showed me a glorious bike on his iphone. It's like all time stood still and there was a glowing aura of light around the pictures on this phone. I was in love. With a bike.

Around this time, this skinny young guy asks my girlfriend if we are OK, seeing that we're bike-bartering with a guy who looks like his name could be Bluto and he just broke out of Angola Prison, and come to find out, the skinny guy is a super nice youth group kid from Arizona who just moved to L.A. two months ago. So. Eventually we left the goon, Bluto, and our new friend, and we went home.

The next day, my girlfriend dresses up in a black track suit and black Shox, and I told her she looked like a back up dancer for JLo. We go to the mall to find cocktail dresses for our Academy Award party on Sunday (insert lame theme music) and our skinny friend meets up with us. I call the bike rapist to follow up, because he made me a $60 deal on the hottest bike in all of L.A., and he said we could come by and get it. I thought to myself that at least I'd met this guy in real life, so this is technically a statistically safer transaction than one via Craigslist. Right? Now, keep in mind that it was the middle of the day and there was a group of us, so I didn't think I was going to get murdered if we did a drive by of the guy's house and did a quick bike pick up. So we did. And now I have a glorious new (sort of) bike. Thanks, bike rapist!

After all of this, my friend and I got cleaned up and met our other "friend" who was in town at the Beverly Hilton. This guy hooked my girlfriend and I up (more like we hooked HIM up, since we didn't get paid CASH MONEY) as "models" for an Oscar party the following day. He took us up to meet the lady coordinating the event. Her name was Anita. She opened her door and said, "Are you girls the models?" and I almost started dying laughing in her face. I wanted to say, "Yes, we are models. And you must be the president." I've gained a good 10 lbs. over the past year. Model my ass. All of a sudden, Anita the slave driver puts all of us to work stuffing VIP bags full of swag. I lasted about 10 minutes. Then I got mad. I started thinking, I'm stuffing $400 gift certificates for facials in bags for assholes. If I was giving shoes to orphans or something, I could justify this free labor, but I have no desire to give rich jerks fancy presents. I exited stage left, right in the middle of this Beverly Hills sweat shop, and sat out in the hallway, grouchy. I called my man friend.

Eventually we left the plantation room of death-bagging and went to the W in Westwood. We stayed there for a minute and then went to a club at the bottom of the Hilton, but I was having some interpersonal issues at the time, misinterpreting text messages, and was on a crying jag for personal reasons that I don't feel like getting into, so I just wasn't in the mood to dance. Or sweat. Or drink. I just wanted to be a hermit and have a good cry.

After a few hours, we left that place and I got separated from my girl friend and wound up with two other guys who were in the group (vendors for the Gifting Suite), one of whom was in a wheelchair, and we're walking through the parking structure, and I'm trying to find my car, and the guy in the wheelchair is popping wheelies around all of these Lamberginis and ferraris and I'm a little worried that he's going to have a head on collision with a $700,000 car, and I am not sure if I'm more worried about him further damaging his health or him damaging the car of some big hulky porn star who will murder all of us when he scratches the paint off his ride.

I eventually find my girlfriend and we pull out of the Hilton garage at 2 in the morning, and the Asian guy working the pay booth says, "Is that your natural hair color?"

I said, "Why would you ever think this is my natural hair color? Don't you see my eyebrows? They're black. Of COURSE this isn't my natural hair color."

Asian parking guy, "I love your hair."

Thanks for complimenting my fakeness. Why not just say, "Nice hair," instead of asking if it's real? People are rude.

We make it home, and pull into my parking garage and my friend gets sick. Really, really sick. So she's there getting sick and I'm sad and crying and then OUT OF THE EFFIN BLUE some wee man Indian guy in a suit comes walking up to me at 2:30 in the morning and asks me if I'd like a piece of gum. It is still in the foil packaging, so I know that it hasn't been laced with roofies, and my breath smelled like a camel corpse, so I took a piece of it. We're both standing there, smacking gum, arms folded, watching my friend ralf like a lion, and I am crying because I thought I got dumped via text, although I didn't. So the Indian guy goes, "Let me read your palm." And I said, "What?" and then I just sort of stuck my palm out like a loser because i didn't have anything else to do.

"Why is your hand so orange?"

"Because I got a spray tan."

Why is everyone so blunt about my fake hair and fake tan? Dicks.

"Oh. Well. This line is long. This means you have a good heart and will live a long life. And you will get married only once. And have two children. And you will be wealthy."

What?

Anyway. Then he tells me to stop crying because I am a good woman. Then he asked if I needed help with my friend, and I said no, and he got on the elevator and left.

So I'm standing in my garage, feeling incredibly weird, chewing gum, wondering if I really just got my palm read by a wee Indian man in a suit, and I am sad. I ask my friend if she'll go up to my apartment and she says she wants to sleep in my car. I get tired. I get really tired. Crying makes me tired as hell.

I tried to pull her butt out of that car for a good 15 minutes.

Eventually, I gave up. I wrote a note on a post it that said, "Come up to my apartment, room ***. Lock my car when you leave. Love, RH" And I stuck it on her leg and locked her in my car.

I started walking toward the elevator, feeling real empty and light and heavy all at once, and the Indian guy walks off the elevator and says he's left his phone in his car. He gets his phone and says, "Where is your friend?" and I said, "I left her in the car. She's sleeping in it. I left her a note with instructions." He is APPALLED at this news and says "You can't let her sleep in the car!"

So we go over to the car and pull her out and prop her up in the corner of the elevator. The whole time, she's got one eye open, and she's giving him the stink eye with the other one.

Ding.

When we got to the 3rd floor, the door opened, and we all stood there like three statues.

My friend says, "We aint' gettin off this elevator til YOU LEAVE."

So the Indian palm readin' gum giver leaves and we walk to my room.

My friend passes out and I cry for the next several hours because messages get misconstrued via texts. I didn't sleep so hot.

The next day, we get all gussied up and go to the Hilton for our Oscar party, but I feel so weird from the day before that I didn't even wash my hair. I just didn't feel like it. Anyway, we show up with hair and make up, and the event coordinator asks us where our "costumes" are. This made me almost faint. Costumes? I was told to wear a black cocktail dress. Does that qualify as an effin COSTUME?!

The lady, who is past her prime and fat and looks like she should sell Mary Kay products begins to brief us on how to walk and what to do. These people were so into it. You should've seen the other models (yes, they were REAL models) walking down the red carpet, swaying their hips like they had springs in them. I started giggling so hard. I had that same, shoulder-shaking giggle that my Aunt Vera used to get at funerals when we all knew it wasn't OK to laugh. One look at my girlfriend and it was over.

The event planners were like pageant moms, telling us exactly how to walk and smile and woo the celebrities with our charming demeanors. What a crock of crap. I whispered to my friend, "What if I just dropped my drawers and took a dump on the red carpet?" I know this was crass. It was incredibly crude. And it was. HILARIOUS. We started laughing so hard we just about fainted.

The coordinators wanted us to learn about each of the vendors so we could tell the "celebrities" about their products. The models were picking up these brochures and trying to memorize all these facts. I prefer to wing it. So I made stuff up. I made so much silly stuff up about those vendors. And the celebs bought it. Every bit of it. It was like "Catch me if you Can."

After we'd been "briefed" on how to walk through a room full of crap with a pretentious butt hole on our arm (really? who needs instructions for that kind of "work?"), we all sort of broke off and wandered around like sheep. We met this real nice lady named Ida. She was about 100 years old and was sharp as a tack. She was an old Jewish lady who had a background in textiles and I'm pretty sure was the most important person in all of Beverly Hills. Man. She was a trip. She talked crap about the other girls and how their dresses were too short and she held mine and my friend's hands as we walked down the red carpet to check out the VIP lounge. It made me feel safe. Holding hands with an old person is awesome. Makes you feel warm and connected. She invited me to a party in the Marina on Tuesday. I might just go.

We walked through the VIP area and saw a room full of auction items. Sports, movie, music memorabilia. A Saints helmet with the whole team's signatures. A guitar signed by Elvis. A "Gone with the Wind" movie poster full of signatures. I was sort of caught up in it for a minute, like I got sucked into vintage Hollywood, back when people were still pure; but it took about five seconds before Anita started screaming at everyone and I wanted to punch her face and remembered that all of this was about money and instant gratification and impulsivity. I was back in reality. But not really, because there is no reality in L.A.

Before we knew it, the D-List celebrities started arriving, and I had to escort the congresswoman to the gifting suite. She was wearing this crazy teal Oprah 1992 suit with huge shoulder pads. I escorted her and her security people and her entourage of dated-looking glamorous friends through the Gifting Suite. I made up crap about every one of those vendors. I made up so much nonsense that I couldn't even give you an example about what I said. I just used words like "haute cotoure" a lot and gave 'em lots of martinis.

I ushered around lots of soap stars, too. I had a few from "The Young and the Restless" who happened to be my favorites.

All of a sudden, I felt a little sad, despite the fact that I had been laughing with my girlfriend all weekend and living the dream. Walking these B-list (C-list? D-list?) celebrities through this room of pink satin and gourmet chocolate and martinis and designer jewelry just made me depressed. It made me want to kick my shoes off and sprawl out in a field of clover and smell the summertime. I thought about that earthy smell and feeling that sticky summer heat on my neck. For a moment, it made me want life to be simple. That vacant look behind fake eyelashes and $90 lip gloss just made me feel like life can be a real tragedy when people forget who they are and where they came from.

Eventually, my friend and I DID kick off our shoes, and we're walking around all of this money,wearing flip flops, smelling like the back of a cab because we'd been sweating our asses off all day. All of a sudden, I see this man with a mohawk and his pomeranian who also has a mohawk. I'd seen him before working at a fabric store in Venice. How the crap did he even get in? Apparently his mohawk dog is famous.

At the end of the day, when we started tearing down the Gifting Suite, a very handsome, silver-haired man in a suit, drinking a Heineken out of the bottle (trashy), approached me and made a few corny jokes about nothing. We started shooting the bull a little bit. Apparently he's been on "The Young and the Restless" since the 1970's. He was a super hunky old man. I always say that I'd totally date Robert Redford, but I was given the opportunity last night, and I have further validated that I'm all talk.

This man asked me if I'd like to have dinner with him. I wanted to laugh slash throw up, but then I realized that he probably dates girls 50 years younger than him all the time, so I just politely told him no thank you and went on about my way.

My friend and I finally went to the after party, where we mingled with some pro athletes and soap stars and people who thought they were a lot more famous than they were. Speaking of people who think they are famous, I saw my ex walk in for a moment, and had that puke feeling, but didn't talk to him and he didn't see me, so I guess everyone came out unscathed.

We danced for a while. I love to dance. I love to dance while sober. I suck at it and I don't care. It burns off all of that nervous energy.

As I'm dancing it out in my dress that barely fits anymore (I kept asking for Vaseline before I zipped it up but finally I sucked in enough to jam that zipper up its ladder) and wearing flip flops that don't match and my make up has slid down my face into oblivion, I spot....

A midget.

A real, live midget.

Now, I know that we aren't supposed to call them "midgets" because some girl in graduate school gave some big speech about multiculturalism and how midgets want the "m" word to be their equivalent to the "n" word because it is very offensive, but I think that calling them "little people" is much, much worse.

Anyway, the reason I bring up this "m" is because he could DANCE LIKE A CHAMP. Like MICHAEL freaking JACKSON. So. Of course. I tackle him.

I ran up to that midget as fast as I could and he and I GOT DOWN. He only came up to about my belly button, but whatever, dude. That midge and I shook our money makers like there was no tomorrow.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, some old Asian man has a heart attack or something, and the music stops, and the curtains are pushed back together, and we all have to get off the dance floor, and the paramedics come rushing in and haul the guy out with a neck brace on, as he's strapped to a gurney.

WHAT.

JUST.

HAPPENED?!

Then, I see my buddy Brian, so we take a few pictures.

All of a sudden, I had that panicked feeling, like faking that I was a model all day was going to make me die. I grab my friend by the hand and we run up to our room to get all of our crap. We start hauling ass through the lobby, holding hands and laughing and running in our flip flops and dresses, and all of a sudden, she drops my hand and runs over to these bird cages that we have been talking about all weekend. The cages are covered up with sheets so the birds can sleep. Please note that she and I hate birds and are mildly scared of them because they are filthy animals and they crap everywhere.

So, fast as lightning, my girlfriend runs over to those 8 foot tall bird cages and tears the sheets off of them and throws them on the ground, like she's a ninja or something, and the birds start squalking like crazy and flapping their feathers, and she and i tear down the hall running like crazy women, laughing so hard that we're about to faint, and I can't even believe that this is the life I'm living, with soap stars and congress women and Indian palm readers and bird cages and models and midgets.