Especially, I discovered, when they are drunk. While my friends at Chez Margaux were all on their first martinis – and their social graces relatively intact – when I arrived at my next stop, the Nolita Italian restaurant Emilio’s, most people in the room had drunk several. And they had lots of questions.
“Did you lose a bet?” a man asked, his voice slurred, as he bumped into my table. I smiled and assured him that I did not. He looked me up and down, unconvinced, while squinting at a wooden bird. “So if you didn’t lose a bet… why are you wearing this?”
At this point, his friend had come over. He was less concerned about why I was wearing it. Instead, he wanted to know how. “Can you sit down in that thing?” he asked.
I mumbled some vague response. The truth, however? I hadn’t figured that last part out yet. My butt was covered in ornaments, including large baubles and pointy wooden edges. If I sat straight down, they went places that large baubles and pointy wooden edges should never go. The other option was to fluff out the skirt over the chair. But the delicate tulle got crammed in the back, risking damage to the dress. Mostly, I just stood around while regretting my choice to wear high heels.
So lost in thought was I about the whole sitting thing that I didn’t notice one of the drunk men was now pushing past me. “’Scuse me, sorry,” he said as the whole dress jingled and jostled. Then I heard it: the now distinctive whomp of an ornament hitting the floor.
“Fuck!” I shout, but then the men grow bored of our conversation and head back to their table to talk about golf. My friend Larry puts his hand on my shoulder. “I have a hot-glue gun in my apartment,” he says. I consider taking him up on it.
An hour later, I’m squeezing through the door of a Toyota Corolla with the dexterity of a cat burglar avoiding red beam lasers during a jewel heist. Except if this was an Ocean’s Eleven-style robbery, the alarm would have been set off long ago. After several minutes of flailing, I’ve found myself in a bizarre yet ornament-friendly position of sitting on my shins while holding onto the headrest for balance. “Sorry, it just takes me a few minutes to get in,” I tell my UberX driver. He doesn’t bother to turn around.
