My hair turned out very nice. The Aveda stylist gave me very caramely highlights and toned down some of the dark that was left over from the last color, so now the overall look is very similar to my natural hair color in about August. I think I’ve mentioned before that I was a blonde until middle childhood, at which time it would darken in the winter and then return to blonde in the summer. Even still, at its darkest, I’m still only a light brown. I tend to color it darker because my eyebrows are dark and the deeper color offsets the redness of my rosacea and makes me feel a little more fully realized. This is doing exactly what highlights are supposed to do, without venturing into the territory of Bride of Frankensteinian streaks. Also, she evened out my handiwork, so I no longer look like a plump Emily the Strange. The world may now exhale.
Chicago. My kind of town. Well, not so much, because the cab drivers frighten and alarm me and the public restrooms usually freak me right the hell out, but Schaumburg is nice. I could probably live in Schaumburg, with its eight million geese and four gazillion little yellow puffball goslings.
I left the house on Friday, pointed my car toward Nordstrom and did not dilly dally until I exited the highway three hours later and pulled into Nordstrom’s parking lot, where I marched right up to the Salon Shoes counter, pointed at a Stuart Weitzman summer display and said ‘Those. Size 12.’ without even thinking about the fact that I had decorated my face with nothing but sunscreen and had vaguely mussy road trip hair. Hell, if I’m going to pay more than my average 1992 paycheck on shoes, I’m not going to let the sales people intimidate me. Thus, I didn’t, strutting up and down the carpeted aisles of sofas in jeans and patent leather strappy sandals, until I found two pairs of summer sandals that met my stringent requirements (style that transcends the years and/or something a drag queen would wear). Then I wandered around the mall for hours, fueled by a banana something whatevahchino, and randomly made friends with a woman in Lane Bryant who convinced me that a gauzy pink/purply/white/sparkly printed ethnic shirt with Stevie Nicks sleeves looked like hell on the hanger but looked really cute when paired with the right cami. I was tired and had been eyeing the piece myself, so I decided to throw my normal fashion dogma (single colors only, no patterns, no sleeves named after people who have cried on VH1’s Behind The Music) to the wind and go with the unexpected. I mean, hey, I bought strappy little delicate sandals with a HEEL, obviously my brain has been taken over by aliens because who knows what I’m going to do next.
Then I rushed over to the little business traveler hotel in the suburbs, checked in, showered and changed quickly in order to have time to find and drive to the restaurant where I’d be meeting lovely Tobermory for cocktails and a hearty 40’s-esque Rat Pack dinner. Then, after all of that rushing, I realized that I could look out my hotel window and watch the valets for said restaurant right next door. Delightful serendipity! I only wish I’d planned that. Tobermory said she’d be wearing jeans, so I went with a kicky jacket over a black shirt and jeans with heels. HEELS! Not only did I buy heels, I brought heels from home as well! Only a weekend with other women could incite such madness.
We had a lovely dinner, in which time we had forty sixteenty billion martinis, including one that tasted like apple pie, every possible course imaginable including desserts that neither of us could finish. We talked about a million things (trading renovation horror stories, of which mine pale in comparison to the Uncle Joe Stain) and giggled and made plans for her next trip to Green Bay. Then we sipped drinks at the bar, at which time clever Paula tried to write something down for me and when we both were short a pen, she pulled out her phone and sent me a text message. At that point, I was ready to put out for her because that was damned impressive. And then I drunkenly stumbled back across the parking lot and up to bed. Alone, so if you wanted some wakka chicka, please direct yourself to the Diaryland slash fiction site that I’m certain exists somewhere.
I woke up reasonably early, showered and was dismayed to learn once again that my hotel didn’t have freaking MTV. That’s all I ask. MTV. A little MTV in the morning. My one guilty pleasure and yet, I am denied at every turn. There is no justice in the world. The weather was shaping up to be incredible, so I opted for the pink hoodie and rhinestone DKNY t-shirt, and then set forth into the dazzling spring morning, happy and content that fun was about to be had and had well.
I ran through Expo and didn’t find a light fixture, then buzzed through Ikea, which was madness on a Saturday morning, complete with tour buses and everything. Then it was off to the city to find my second hotel of the weekend and hook up with Chiara and Jess. I dropped my car with the hotel’s valet, dropped off my stuff in the room, and then caught a cab to the aquarium, where I took photos for something like five different groups until I heard a familiar ‘Hey girl’ and saw Chiara. Yay! We hugged and decided to check out the sharks since Jess was running late and if fate decided we had to see the sharks twice, well, then, so be it.
And the sharks were cool. Very cool, as only sharks can be. I was a little surprised by how small they were, especially when compared to the monsters in the New Orleans aquarium, but then I remembered that it’s a pretty new exhibit, and it’s not easy to ship a two-ton behemoth. They also had some incredible animals I hadn’t seen before, such as a guitar shark and some recently discovered rays. Checking out the fish with Chiara was a great experience because she is the only person I know who gets as excited about marine life as I do. Sometimes I feel self-conscious when I am all agog over sharks with other people but with Chiara, it was clearly the accepted paradigm. We met up with Jessamyn and her delightful daughter Katie. We were all pretty hungry, so we went to the Aquarium’s restaurant overlooking the lake and had a lovely lunch, for which many goldfish crackers bravely gave their lives.
After lunch, we wandered around the other exhibits, including the otters, who do indeed always look like they are having fun, probably because, as Chiara pointed out, they are essentially a pack of basset hounds with the best toy feet ever. Then, in what was probably the most extraordinary moment out of a weekend filled with extraordinary moments, we were watching the beluga whales swimming when one of them decided that it wanted to have a conversation with us. It started by swimming around the tank, then when it would get to us, it slowed down, popped its head out of the water, and checked us out very slowly. After several laps, each punctuated by the prolonged scope, it started talking to us during these moments, and once even circled back slowly so that it could finish making its chirpy squeaks, its noggin flexing and contracting as it made its mammalian oration. I don’t know why it decided to be chatty with us, but it felt as though we had been picked because of our intense sensitivity to marine life. Or maybe it recognized the collective hotness and was giving us our props.
Jess had to run and we weren’t sure what time Trance was going to meet us, so we did a fast forward on the remaining exhibits and then caught a cab back to my hotel, where Trance did indeed meet us about five minutes after we got there. We all made ourselves cute and Chiara modeled her absolutely adorable black circle skirt that made her look like she had just stepped daintily out of an Audrey Hepburn movie. We then jumped in my car, sped over Lakeshore Drive and uptown to have tapas with Jess, Dawnie, and two girls named Kate. The best thing about tapas is that you can try so many things that you might not normally try, so I just left the ordering to my pretty girlfriends and figured that no matter what they’d pick, I’d probably like something. And the interesting thing is that I liked everything, but the things that I loved the most were totally unexpected. We had pitchers of sangria and a collective seven-person orgasm over the baked goat cheese on pesto garlic toast and the chicken croquettes and the bacon-wrapped dates.
The bacon-wrapped dates!
(They needed their own paragraph.)
My god, the bacon-wrapped dates To be honest, I’m not a date person. I remember specifically digging out the dried dusty squares in the coop granola my mother used to feed us and leaving them in tiny little pyramids on my napkin. The supposed quality dates, in those little clear trays at Whole Foods or whatnot, they freak me out a little. They look a bit like carefully preserved cockroaches (I’m sorry!). But I’ve seen the Two Fat Ladies wrap things in dates, specifically inserting a chicken liver into a date and then wrapping it with bacon, and I had decided long ago that I would happily try anything made by the Two Fat Ladies. So I could handle a date wrapped in bacon, and thank the heavenly Lord that I did because I will be replicating them at my next party.
Then we had many many desserts and I couldn’t finish mine (who is this person, with the high heels and the colorful shirt and the not finishing the desserts?) mostly because it was a caramel-covered banana with ice cream and not a caramel-covered bacon-wrapped date.
After dinner, we discussed possible options, such as the karaoke bar that Paula had suggested, but the consensus was that we were really close to a goth bar, so we’d walk down there. Kate and Kate said goodnight, as Kate had to graduate from law school (Woo!) the next morning, but after attracting the attention of some interesting Chicago wildlife (who like big butts and apparently cannot lie), we traversed up a dark alley (ooooOOOOOoooh!) into a mostly empty dark goth bar. After a pirate checked our ids, we settled into a dark corner (wait, they were all dark’ even the middle was dark) and chatted and watched the place fill up with, as Jen put it, Count Choculas. I swear there was a guy with horns. HORNS! Then the effects of our exciting day started to hit us and after Jess, Chiara and Dawn left, I zoned out for about half an hour and then announced that I was losing my ability to remain conscious. Jen and I met Luva as we were leaving, but since she was coming only to hang out with us, we gave her a ride home and then because the trains had stopped running, Jen camped out on the sofa in my hotel room.
Part 2 coming soon!
