My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [7]
The thing is, tonight isn’t just an event for people who look beautiful. The author’s invited revelers are decidedly academic. Their repartee sparkles just as much as the weighty diamonds on the women’s necks, wrists, ears, and hands.
Throughout the room, snatches of Important Conversation can be heard on a variety of highbrow topics: this season at the Lyric Opera; a new piece of surrealist art by someone named Claude; and the best vintage of Mouton Rothschild. Guests discuss amending sections of Chicago’s municipal code and the risks commercial paper carries because there’s no collateral behind it. The author holds court in the corner by the bar, detailing the ways in which the Italian legal system differs from our own.
At this point, it should be fairly obvious that I’m not the author in question, and this isn’t my event. I mean, my last book release party was held around my tiny kitchen table and in my microscopic living room with everyone drinking Two Buck Chuck, eating bricks of cheese from Aldi, listening to the GoGos, and playing Scattergories.13 At some point in the evening, I went upstairs and changed into my lightest pair of pajama pants because I got sweaty.
So this here? This tonight? Is so not my scene. My friend Stacey, another writer (but not the host), invited me. She keeps encouraging me to mingle so I’m not bored while she says hello to other guests. Unfortunately, small talk is not my forte, unless it involves my hair or a solid rehashing of that time Pumkin spit on Miss New York in the first season of Flavor of Love. (My academic summation? Them bitches be crazy and shit!)
I quietly slurp my Diet Coke and contemplate what I’ll say if I’m asked a direct question about any of the topics floating around in here. I get superanxious when I’m put on the spot about subjects I don’t know much about. What am I supposed to say about municipal code? It’s good? It’s bad? It’s Dan Brown’s new book? I have no freaking clue.
As for opera, the extent of my familiarity comes from Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places saying, “La Bohème—it’s an op-er-a.” Perhaps I should interrupt the surrealist conversation dudes to let them in on my theory that all contemporary art is a huge scam? I mean, last time I went to a museum, there was a barbell sculpted out of Vaseline. Seriously. You think a piece like that’s going to make the curators at the Louvre go all, “Ooh, let’s put the greasy barbell next to the Venus de Milo! Maybe we can even build out her stumps with Vaseline!” Right.
I notice Stacey nodding encouragingly at me from across the room, so I steel myself. I’m determined to at least try . . . so then I can quit legitimately. I start grinning awkwardly at the people around me, attempting to catch their eyes and be invited into a conversation. But no one bites because I’m pretty sure I come across as desperate and freaky as the chicks at an open-casting call for Rock of Love, minus the boob job and inflamed downstairs lady parts.
This would be so much easier if I were drinking. A little social lubricant would go a long way to make me feel more at ease. But Fletch is joining us later tonight, and I lost the rock-paper-scissors on who’d be the designated driver. Why do I perpetually remember too late that the bastard always throws scissors?
I’m on my third lap around the party14 when I hear a couple of professor-looking guys talking about Syriana.
Hey! Here’s my opening!
I saw that movie!
I can join in!
Look at me go!
So . . . apparently when two men wearing tweedy jackets with leather elbow patches are discussing the geopolitical ramifications of the creation of an artificial state, à la Iraq, they aren’t looking for someone to interject, “I totally saw that movie! And if you ask me, Clooney really needs to lay off the pie!” They stared at me as though I was insane, and I slunk off back to the safety of Stacey’s side.
I tried, it was hard, I quit, the