Velvet Ropes

By the time four o'clock rolled around yesterday I was deep into a productive day that included a job interview, a hard core workout and completing a laundry list of errands. And when I picked up my ringing phone to the sound of my friend Z's voice suggesting we go out to dinner, I didn't think for a second that dinner would lead to 4am Disco Fries at my neighborhoods stankiest diner. I don't think that's what Z was expecting either, but somehow that's how our night shaped up.

After a couple glasses of wine over a quiet dinner at one of my favorite local restaurants Z and I were digging through my closet getting dressed for a night on the town much to my husband, T's, dismay. The wheels were in motion and what I thought was going to be a quiet evening of scrapbooking with a glass of vino was transforming into an all night rager with velvet ropes and diamond-priced vodka. Ever since I was laid off from my job I swore I would take advantage of having my weekdays off and party with people who's beautiful faces and bodies allow them the luxury of never having to work a 9 to 5, only I've always felt too guilty to actually do it. Until last night that is when the lure of a night out with one of my besties and the thrill that comes with dressing up one of my friends in my clothes got the best of me and I was raring to go.

So at 9:30 last night Z and I headed out dressed in my Sunday best, her teetering in a pair of my size-bigger-than-hers platform stillettos and started our night at one of my favorite Lower East Side spots, Fat Baby. It's probably not a good thing when you walk into a place and the bouncer recognizes you as the girl who sat in his truck eating the Pringles you had bought for him last time you were there, but that's what happened and after two palpatation inducing RedBull Vodka's I was once again best friends with Mr. Bouncer Man.

Upon hearing that there was a little-person tossing event at Fat Baby that night and wanting to really take advantage of our freebie Wednesday night Z and I decided to head out to one of New York's toughest doors, 1 Oak. It's infamous doorman, Ben is armed nightly with the excuse, "Sorry, tonight's a private party" and an I-don't-give-a-shit-who-you-say-you-know attitude normally reserved for someone of much larger stature. So you could imagine my nerves that we'd be spending our big night out standing outside the door like losers begging to be let in, however, if I've learned anything during my years in NYC, it's that the key to getting in anywhere is to go early. Sure, you'll feel like a lame-ass for first hour when you're one of only a handful of people in the lounge, but before you know it you're another drink deep, the room is filled up and no one knows that the only reason you got past Ben in the first place is because you showed up at the embarassing hour of 11:30 when everyone knows the party doesn't start until 1. And so we rolled up behind a group of four other losers, dropped a generic name like Joe to Ben saying, "he knows you" and he must have been feeling generous because after walking away for 30 seconds he came back and ushered us in.

We were greeted with an room empty save for a duo of cougars excitedly sitting at a booth and just thirty minutes later we were running up the bar tab of the only two dudes in the place with $18 Vodka Sodas. Somewhere between Vodka number three and water number two the place filled up with some seriously beautiful people making me feel like a 5'5" midget. Forgetting where I was, I started telling some model about the "steal" I got on my BCBG dress when she complimented me on it and she gave me a look like I had just whipped out a coupon to buy myself a drink. The night wore on and my next trip to the bathroom with Z resulted in me earning my entrance into 1 Oak by cleaning up the projectile vomit she spewed all over the bathroom for five minutes before heading back upstairs where she snuck another drink on our "friend's" tab even though I begged her to pound a water. Not one to stop a party, I slammed a water, ordered another cocktail and hit the dance floor with Z alternately rocking my best moves and talking shit to people who are way cooler than I will ever be. I think I may have gone so far as to use the words "industry" and "fierce."

Then, just as we were desperately trying to order another round with two devestatingly pretty gay men whom we had just annointed our new best friends, something clicked and we were officially over it. Looking around and the over abudance of scarves, neon hoodies and purposely messy hair Z and I realized that at 29 years old, with wonderful men waiting for us at home we really didn't care all that much about seeing or being seen by people whos priorities are seven years and 10 pounds behind ours so we left. But we weren't headed home.

Anyone who knows Z knows full well that a night out with her doesn't end with leaving the bar, it begins there and what happens between 3 and 4am is more exhausting than the previous five hours of dancing. Over the next hour, to the best of my recollection, this is what happened. We got into a cab and when the driver pulled over to let us out I noticed the street sign and realized he dropped us off 8 avenues from where we needed to be. We got back in the cab, told him he was a jerk, to take us to where we needed to go and that we weren't paying for the rest of the ride. We stuck to our guns and our cab ride ended with him getting out of the cab yelling that he was going to call the cops on us to which one of responded, "For what? Being smokin hot?" I should've known that there was no way Z was just going to quietly go home from there and against everything I believe in (this week) she insisted that we hit up a diner. I begged, pleaded and finally relented as we walked through the doors of a diner I haven't visited since T and I masacared a pound of rare roast beef on another 3am morning about a year ago.

There I was, putting myself into cheese coma sharing French Onion Soup, Disco Fries and a Tuna Melt with Z, swearing to myself that I would spend two hours at the gym as soon as I woke up). I was hopeful that paying the check would signal the end of our night, but as we both teetered home, having switched shoes Z announced that she had to find a charger for her dying cell phone and asked whoever roamed the streets if they thought the Verizon store was open. I don't know what made her think that Verizon opens up at 4am, but she was on a mission and when Z is on a mission, there's no stoping her. After 15 years of friendship, I've learned that what Z wants, Z gets. So after "quietly" bursting into my apartment and trying not to wake T as we kicked off our shoes and "tip toed" into the bedroom to see if his charger would fit her phone, both he and I were watching her head out the front door.

So while Z was out scouring Manhattan for a cell phone charge at 4am, T and I sat there arguing over what to do about it. He insisted that I go after her, I insisted that he go back to bed. After all, this is the same Z who once ordered a pizza from her car in parking deck at 3am because we refused to go to a diner. After calling her dead phone forty times and after 30 minutes of arguing with each other, there was finally a knock on our door. T opened it up and in waltzed Z proudly holding her new cell phone charger which she procured by having a cabbie driver her halfway across town and refusing to pay him unless he waited for her while she found a charger that fit her phone at the only open Walgreens in NYC. And so T was finally able to get back to bed three hours before he had to get up for work and five minutes later found himself snuggled up with two girls sporting cheese fry breath. Now being in bed with two women would normally be every man's fantasy, only it's not so sexy when you find yourself clinging on to the only corner of bed and sliver of blanket your sleep-talking wife and her sleep-thrasing best friend haven't claimed as their own between snores and kicks.

By 12pm today Z and I were fully awake and hungry once again. After a trip to another diner for breakfast and Z hitting up three parking garages before figuring out where she'd parked her car it was time for me to clean up the Tornado named Unplain Jane that swept through our apartment last night just in time to meet my husband for an after-work (or in my case, after-nothing) cocktails event. Ouch.

If I learned anything last night it's that nothing good happens after 2:30am and maybe I'm getting a little too old to be sucking up to bouncers for access to places I am no longer cool enough for, but at least I can say I've been to 1 Oak and am over it. (That's not to say that if Lindsay Lohan had walked in I would've creamed myself and returned every Wednesday night for the rest of my life.) Not to be a sap but nights like these always serve as a great reminder that velvet ropes, over priced cocktails and fancy people desperately searching for the next-best-thing don't equal good times. Good times come packaged as hilarious best friends and amazing husbands. Next time we can skip the lines and the pretty people because it's a lot more fun to sit around getting fat and having laughs with your friends and family over an underpriced meal.

A Swift Kick In The Ass

When I woke up this morning I knew I had to move a little more quickly than usual thanks to the knowledge that I had to be somewhere at the crack of dawn, noon. A little daunted by the prospect of getting in a workout, getting dressed and actually blowdrying my hair and applying make up in time to get out the door for my lunch date, I moved more quickly than I have been in recent days. After forcing myself to finish my workout, I made the mistake of getting on the scale at the gym. What followed was a BBM to my husband that read, "I am fat, unemployed and lazy, do you want an annulment?" Taking his non-response as an indicator that he was considering my offer, I sulked home and began wallowing in the fact that after three weeks of real unemployment (I don't count the period between losing my job and the wedding) I had become everything I swore I wouldn't when I wrote a bit of sunshine in October called, "That's What Unemployement's For.

Realizing I'd let my writing slack off and that I'd become complacent in calling a day where I hit the gym, cooked dinner and sent out some resumes a success I decided it was time for a swift kick in the ass. I'm not one to respond well to prodding (the truth is I'm so stubborn that even if I want or planned to do a chore/task/whatever, the minute someone tells me I HAVE to do it, consider it NEVER HAPPENING). Combine that with the fact that, as my husband announced across the dinner table during one of my first meetings with his entire family, "she's a total narcissist," I knew that I needed to find some other way to motivate myself. As such, I decided that you, my readers, are the biggest motivation I have. The more hits I see on that statcounter, the more I'm convinced like Sally Field that, "you like me! you really really like me!", and the more I want to keep going.

And so as my motivation to not let the two Essay Collections I'm working on fall by the wayside like so many projects before, I've decided that once weekly I must finish an essay and publish an excerpt on UnPlain Jane. And so today I give you an excerpt from the first essay in the collection Wedding.Honeymoon.Disaster. : A Collection of Essays from a Calamity Bride.

So without further ado, here is a little taste from Chapter 1:

The Dress: My Sordid Tale of Buying off The Rack

....my fabulous fucking dress from Saks.

The dress was perhaps the single most important element of “MY wedding” (aside from the groom). There is something about a dress, any dress, even a work-dress, that lights a little fire in the pit of my belly. The glorious dress. The most revered element of my wardrobe. With just this single, solitary garment, the dress, any woman can turn herself into a myriad of things. With the right bounce and a pretty frill, a dress can turn you back into an innocent again and with the right hemline and cleavage, a dress can turn you into the raging slut you always wanted to be (or were in college). With the right dress, and only the right dress, you can marry the man of your dreams and for just one day be the princess/diva/Mormon you always envisioned yourself as.

I learned the importance of the dress at the ripe old age of six when my mother purchased and subsequently hung in my closet, what I referred to as my “speech dress” (mainly because it was the dress I would put on when I would stand on top of my bed, giving speeches on topics of great important, like Strawberry Shortcake, to the audience of stuffed animals I had carefully arranged on the floor below me.) My speech dress had that perfect amount of swing that a six year old needs to do that endearing chin-down, hold on to the bottom of the hem with both hands and sway back and forth move indicating we either have to pee or want a new toy. Incidentally, I still use this move whenever I try to get my new Husband to perform some sort of emasculating act of for me, because if he really loved me, yes, he would allow me to put mascara on his incredibly long eyelashes.

The very first time I wore my speech dress was when I played the illustrious role of the “The Capital Letter I” in Ms. Zangy’s First Grade Class production of “The Alphabet”. Through the magic of poster board and the fact that, still in her early thirties, my mother was inclined to be crafty, I waltzed onto stage wearing my speech dress and a Letter I slung over both shoulders, looking like the guy on 7^th Avenue wearing a cardboard sign advertising nails, waxing and/or threading. The same guy that I tell to “Fuck Off” every day when he shoves a flyer in my face. But on that day, even though I was wearing what could’ve just as easily been an advertisement for Mexican food and even if I was the overweight Capital Letter I with a bowl cut, standing next to Jennie DelMont who starred as the adorably dimpled and pig-tailed Lower Case Letter i, I was unstoppable. I was unstoppable because I was wearing my speech dress and that made me the star of the show.

I wore that dress as often as humanly possible until my mother finally threw it out when, in the fourth grade, I tried to shove my “80 pound whale” self (as my gentle older sister dubbed me at gym class weigh-ins) into my “speech dress” and nearly took our dog Curly’s eye out when the zipper popped off and went flying. My dress obsession was born and since that formative time as a burgeoning, first-grade fashionista, I have dubbed myself an expert in dresses, especially white ones, which is why I placed the absolute utmost importance on finding the wedding dress of my dreams. Thus, on a chilly fall night, with print-outs in hand and my best friend, A, in tow, I daintily pressed the number “3” on the elevator at Saks Fifth Avenue and sashayed past Contemporary Sportswear into their Bridal Salon for my 6pm appointment with a bridal consultant...

I hope you enjoyed your first taste of "Wedding. Honeymoon. Disasater." Look for a short excerpt each week from this project or my other baby, "Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Other Great Disappointments.

Dating

When we woke up this morning, my husband T rolled over, exhaled an ungodly combination of raspberry, mango and tequila into my face and then scratched himself. He got up, sauntered into the bathroom to do what we all do after a long night out on the town. Through the bathroom door, I heard him fart and before the look of disgust could spread across my face, he chuckled at the sound of his own flatulence and somehow I was charmed. I stretched out, smiled and thought, "I love him so much." I burped loudly, rolled over and waited for him to come back to bed so we could tell each other how cute (read: disgusting) we are.

This situation is nothing out of the ordinary. We've been together for five years and there are few boundaries left between us. For better or for worse, we pick our noses in front of each other, we force each other into Dutch Ovens and we've most recently forayed into the mysterious arena of belly-button lint (a fascinating phenomenon.)

However, this morning was different. It was different because instead of waking up, warm and snuggley, in our own bed, in our little apartment where no one can see us, we woke up on an air mattress in the living room of the apartment that our friends D & K share as a couple. They were just a few feet away sleeping with the bedroom door open, in full ear shot of anything and everything we said or did and knowing full well that they would not be spared a smell or sound that emanated from us, we continued on with the same comfort level that we would've if we'd been hungover and disgusting in the privacy of our own home.

We finished the morning with a cup of coffee, a four-person-revolving-door visit to the john, and the unabashed devouring of the first bagel I've had in over a year. As D & K kindly drove us to the nearest New Jersey Transit stop, my husband shamelessly insisted that if we didn't make it the train, they'd be driving us all the way back to Manhattan in much the same way he would half-jokingly coax a ride out of one of our family members. It was at this moment, I pulled out my travel-pack of Pepto Bismol chewables and asked if anyone else in the car was churning the kind of butter in their stomach that I was. Just then, I started thinking about just how long we'd been "dating" this couple and how the relationship had evolved.

We met D & K sometime around 2 and a half years ago through mutual friends and bonded instantly over the fact that we were both "JewTalian". A few weeks later we saw each other again and bonded over the fact that we all like champagne. Lots of it. It wasn't long after that that we ran into each yet again and had the first of what would be many dance-offs at our mutual friend's wedding. Things just clicked and somewhere along the line, one of us suggested that we get together, outside of the mutual friend's celebrations to, ya know, have dinner or something. After four two many cocktails, the next thing we knew we were having our first sleepover when D & K came into the city for our first official "date" as a couple.

The morning after was slightly awkward as is any "morning after" the first time a Saturday night date turns into a Sunday morning, "can I get you breakfast?" Fortunately, when you're a couple dating other couples, the day after the "third date" doesn't require an STD test or Plan B. What it does involve is staying in bed just a little longer than you normally would, not sure when you should go out into the living room where your new friends are sleeping on your air mattress and when you finally do, odds are they've already silently snuck out leaving you an adorable note and letting you know they had a great time. That's how our first morning after with D & K went and shortly thereafter we were making plans to visit them in New Jersey.


Slowly, but surely, you start to bond. Just as two single people bond over their likes, dislikes, random coincidences and shared bad habits; when you're dating another couple you start to bond over the same things. Take D & K for example, as we got to know them we realized we shared some:

Shared Likes: Wine, Drunken Hugs, Guitar Hero
Shared Dislikes: Running out of Wine, Passing out Too Early; Mean People
Random Coincidences: Being "Jewtalian"; Shared Zodiac Signs
Shared Bad Habits: Sneaking Shots, Starting Ridiculous (but-totally-justified-at-the-moment) Arguments with Each Other, Giving Customer Service Representatives an Attitude.

Unlike a date between two single people, a couple date lacks the prospect of sex (unless you're dating at the Burning Man). In fact, a couple date generally lowers the chances of anyone having sex since it usually involves an ungodly and unsexy amount of food. It also usually ends in some rendition of "Oh my gawd! He does too!" and "She gives you shit for that too!" So by the end of the date you feel fat, drunk and too annoyed at your significant other to even think about quietly banging one out while your newly acquired couple-friends sleep no more than 30 feet away.

Dating other couples generally leaves you hungover and having spent too much money without the promise of sex, diamonds or someone to split the rent with. It almost wouldn't seem worth it, but when you wake up one morning with dragon breath, diarrhea, and only a vague recollection of why you told off that cab driver/coat check girl/bartender as a team, it's nice to know you can walk twenty feet, fart in unison and turn to your friends to ask, "what the hell happened last night?!"

Old, Fat and Drunk

Old: It was around the time that my now husband, T, proposed to me that I started to feel like an actual grown up. Since then, I've been waiting for the day that I wake up somewhere in my late forties, the proud parent of a teenager who hates me and the worst part of it all: I look the part. Even at twenty-eight years old, I wake up every morning and look in the mirror expecting this to be the day that I am officially old.

Fat: I've been fat before so I know it well. And while I don't actually enjoy being fat, I certainly enjoy getting fat. I could go 7 rounds with the best of them and find the strength to gnaw on that last helping of Prime Rib even when I am physically uncomfortable from whatever ungodly amount of food I've already eaten. I am missing that mouth-stomach connection that lets a person know what they put in their mouth affects how their stomach will feel. I love getting fat. I hate being fat.

Drunk: Since the very first time, when at 16, my friend and I raided my parent's basement bar and put together a lethal combination of a little pour from every bottle they had so no one single bottle would look any emptier, I've enjoyed a good night of boozing. Sometimes I get too drunk and start a fight with my husband/best friend/a bouncer. Sometimes I don't get drunk enough and decide I'd rather be somewhere else. And sometimes, I get just drunk enough, dance all night and happily skip home sweaty and ready for a 3am feast.

There you have it. Old, Fat and Drunk: Three things I don't aspire to me, but three things I found myself feeling after the 48 hours that made up this weekend. Is this married life?

When I woke up Sunday morning, with bleary eyes and a headache, I had to log on to UnPlain Jane and read what I had written the night before. I remembered the basic premise and bits and pieces of what I wrote, but to be honest, it was somewhat of a blur. It's not that I went out boozing all night, came home tanked and decided to write my blog. I didn't go out at all. Instead I sat on my couch, in front of my laptop and downed a bottle of wine.

As I did this, T sat as his desk doing work and downed his own bottle of wine. Next thing we knew, it was after midnight and we were hammered and looking for more wine. Left with only the option of popping a bottle of expensive champagne that someone had bought us for our wedding, we began racking our brains. For some reason drinking that special bottle of celebration bubbly didn't seem right given that we were a) already hammered and b) had basically only communicated with each other via Instant Messenger all night from our respective computers . Always the optimist, I insisted to T that one of the two wine shops on our block HAD to be open. This is New York and more importantly the guy in the store told me just the other day that he works until 3am every night. (It seemed to make sense at the time.)

T, insisting that I was wrong popped his head out the bedroom and saw that the shop across the street was closed. "Mall za deedle-dum!" I slurred. What I was attempting to say was, "Call the other one!", and either because he was equally inebriated or because I said it at the same volume my grandmother uses when she's talking on 'one of those cell phones', he understood me and started dialing. When nobody answered, we looked at each other silently contemplating getting ourselves dressed and going to see for ourselves, until T came to the rescue remembering we had enough Vodka in the freezer to feed my Russian-waxer's family for a year.

With nothing to mix it with, we clinked our Vodka on the Rocks' together and what happened next was a blur. At some point I went to bed and at some point T fell asleep on the couch watching an infomercial for gardening equipment. He made it into the bedroom sometime around 6am and when we both woke up around three hours later, I had the kind of headache I usually reserve for nights that involve out of town visitors and my need to "show 'em how it's done." As we snuggled up, smelly and hungover to watch a back episode of Scrubs in bed, I realized that some might say we were losers, but given that we had both gotten a bunch of work done the night before, I would just say we are OLD and, of course, DRUNK.

This brings me to FAT. For the six months leading up to our wedding T essentially became Manorexic and I shunned bread like it was a pair of Payless shoes and on January 3, 2009, in the best shape of our lives we tied the knot. As the band packed up, I began shoving chocolate covered pretzels into my mouth with full anticipation that this was the beginning of what would be a two-week binge. All throughout our engagement as we turned down seconds, skipped dessert and ordered our Chinese food steamed, T and I found ourselves talking dreamily about the "Fat Phase" we were going to enter once the glass was broken and the hora was danced. A slight snag on the honeymoon caused us to lose 5 pounds each and we spent the last three days of this vacation gorging ourselves. I wouldn't even allow myself to sleep during the entire 10 and a half hour flight home, but rather I made sure to wake up every hour or so to inhale a cookie or six, because I knew the minute we touched down in NYC, I'd be back on a diet.

And I was. Our flight landed at 6am and I was at the gym by 11. For the next three days I re-shunned bread, ordered my usual steamed vegetable dumplings and turned down dessert. I was down three pounds by Thursday and after watching T make up for those three days of not eating on the honeymoon, I was starting to feel a little deprived. Why should he get to suck down an entire bag of Weight Watchers chocolates without guilt and truly believing that because the bag said Weight Watchers it's OK to eat the whole thing? Why should I, hammered and hungry on Saturday night settle for a 100 calorie bag of popcorn? I shouldn't. And so, Sunday morning when I woke up feeling old and having been drunk, I was well on my way to achieving the Married Trifecta of Old, Fat and Drunk.

We started off our Sunday with brunch with some family members. With a hangover stomach ache as an excuse, I allowed myself to pound through the better part of not one, but two baskets of muffins. And thank god our nephew hasn't yet developed an adult sized appetite because I was more than happy to inhale a good part of the French Toast and Sausage he wasn't going to eat. It was tough because the three year old didn't feel like sharing, but T and I were sneaky enough to steal it off of his plate every time he got preoccupied shouting "Taxi!" out the window. Luckily for us a Taxi drives by every 3 seconds in NYC. Combine that with the fact that I all but licked my own plate clean, we left brunch full enough to warrant a gym visit later in the day.

So after an hour of cardio, during which I could feel the muffins swirling back and forth in my stomach, I felt I had sufficiently thwarted the extra pounds I was eating my way into. Or so I thought. Cut to a few hours later. Enough time had passed since both my workout and my last meal to dissolve my resolve and once again, I was on my way to FAT. It was Sunday night, our first week home had come to and the only way I saw fit to finish out the day was with a fried appetizer, a tortellini dinner and a hearty helping of ice cream for dessert. I'm sometimes amazed that T manages to remain attracted to me after watching me eat. As if fighting with him over the last tortellini wasn't enough, perhaps hopping into bed with a piece of buttered bread would send him over the edge? Not so.

Now here it is, Monday afternoon and I'm sitting on the couch feeling married, which is to say, feeling OLD FAT and DRUNK, well not drunk, but ready for a glass of wine. Luckily we have plans next weekend and that's usually enough motivation to keep me on the straight and narrow in order to look my best by the weekend. What's better is that we're going out and raging Saturday night, so I can wake up Sunday feeling Old and Drunk once again and have the entire day to complete the circle once more. Life is good.