Gibsons Have Pearl Onions

Lunch w/Belinda at the Alexis Café.

Then later on in the evening, brews & trivia at the Parkview w/Ellen & her pal Becky, a pretty woman in her early 60s with blonde hair, well-moisturized skin, and Scandinavian features.

We did very badly with the trivia—mainly because I just could not unearth the name of the movie Eyes Wide Shut from the kitchen midden of consciousness even though I’ve seen the movie more than once. Also I could not remember that Alexander Hamilton is on the $10 bill or that martinis & Gibsons differ from one another only in the detail of garnish.

“Venetian masks! Orgies!” I said to my teammates. “I should know this.” But they didn’t want to discuss Stanley Kubrick as an exemplar of the auteur theory of filmmaking.

Instead, they wanted to discuss Becky’s love life—much enhanced since she met an Irish musician four months ago and had sex on the first date.

“Irish!” I said.

“The accent is so dreamy,” Becky said. “You should see the looks on the faces of the ladies in the bars where he plays.”

Last spring, she’d bought a house with her son & his wife but now is barely speaking to them because they objected to her bringing the Irish troubadour around so often.

“Well, kids do have issues with the sex lives of their parents,” I said. “My kids are convinced that I’ve only had sex two times in my life. And enjoyed it neither time.”

Privately, though, I thought there might be some sense to the offspring’s objections.

I mean, Becky is talking marriage and happily-ever-afters, and I am thinking, Whoa! Someone’s been watching too many Hallmark movies.

Decent-looking woman of a certain age with a respectable amount of money? That Irish troubadour found the gold at the end of the rainbow in your honeypot! He’s probably writing all his mates back home, And when you have an accent, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.

People in these parts are not exactly what you’d describe as sophisticated, though, so that only applies to accents from the UK.

Becky radiated that palpable aura of well-being that women consistently having good sex radiate. Even when she was dishing about the most recent X-Husband, her fourth, who was "controlling", which I interpreted as meaning just five steps away from abusive. She divorced him at the beginning of this year.

I don't know why men don't radiate when they're having good sex. But they don't.

“Now, I’m a roadie,” Becky cooed.

For some reason, the Irish troubadour’s most consistent gig is a Virginia roadhouse on the far outskirts of the Beltway, and he doesn’t have a car, so she’s the one who drives him.

“Last week, I met a tranny. What do they call them now?”

“Transexual,” I supplied helpfully.

“And now that tranny is my new best friend!”

###

It was fun to get out of the house & into a bar where the crowd erupted into loud cheers & wolf whistles every time the Yankees scored a homerun on the bar’s 75-inch flatscreen & the waitresses were so slammed with customer orders that we didn’t get our pizzas until an hour after we ordered them.

I don’t know how fun it would be if I did it more often.

But it was fun last night.