As soon as Michelle and I got on the plane to Phoenix yesterday, we got out some books. Michelle was reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and merrily reciting facts and figures about American consumption to me; I was reading The Craft of Argument -- for imminent instruction at that university where I will shortly recommence teaching -- meanwhile moaning and muttering, "Wait... what?" (To which, of course, there could be no answer from anyone.) Michelle, however, was rapt with attention. She was flipping her pages with great speed. I awoke with my head on the window sometime very near the end of the flight, having read only approximately 25 pages of The Craft of Argument and unable to remember having fallen asleep. Michelle had finished her book and was looking alert. I looked down into my lap to find an exercise in which one compels one's students to envision themselves trapped inside an elevator with one.
"No," I wrote neatly beside that one, which is polite lesson-planning parlance for "Stop, thief: Please return the person I thought I might grow up to be post haste, and take this one that I have somehow turned out to be away with you instead."
The plane landed.
We had approximately half an hour until the curtain would rise -- both literally and figuratively -- on Shaina's bachelorette party: a viewing of a local theater company's The Pajama Game... to which we were supposed to be wearing pajamas. With the help of Michelle's mother's generous ride-giving, we made it to the theater -- Michelle gamely wearing pajamas, complete with sleep mask and slippers, and I, rather less gamely, in my customary sneakers and jeans. Michelle had brought an extra sleep mask for me to wear with my regular clothes. With my black-and-white sweater the whole effect was rather one of a burglar more than someone sort of in her pajamas. All I was missing was my requisite sack labeled VITTLES and a good sneaking tip-toe walk. Seeing this reflected in a nearby window, I carried the sleep mask in my hand, not wanting to frighten the elderly. All through the theater ran Michelle-in-Pajamas and Bad-Attitude-Slash-Sleeps-in-a-Tank-Top Kara-Not-in-Pajamas, trying to find our group.
We found them.
They were the only ones wearing pajamas.
Apparently this was not some yuk-yuk bachelorette party idea that had been cooked up, but the suggestion of the theater company to all the theatergoers, who had apparently either not gotten the memo, thought better of it, or, like me, sleep in tank tops. Basically all of them were over 60. The thing was, I really didn't have a bad attitude. I sincerely wanted to do what Shaina would like. But I was pretty sure she wouldn't want me showing up in just a tank top, or else any of the other inappropriate-for-the-theater sleepwear that has recently crept into the Fort.
I don't know what you know about The Pajama Game, but you ought to at least know this: It is a musical. A rather less-than-modern, hokey musical where people say "Gee whiz" and there is an instrument in the orchestra to make a HONK-HONK or whooooOOOOP! noise after an actor makes a corny joke. I repeat also that it is a musical.
By the end of intermission, we had departed.
"This is actually good," I said, suddenly reasonably more game as our cars literally peeled away from the scene of the crime. "Fleeing. Fleeing should be part of any upstanding bachelorette party." (Like I know anything about this, never having been to one before.) In the movies, bachelorette parties involve male strippers dressed as firemen or air traffic controllers; they involve unadvisable amounts of tequila shots; they involve dancing on tables; feather boas; boa constrictors; jock straps. This was not that. This, despite the pajamas and musicals, was fleeing, followed by spaghetti, which to me is significantly less frightening than the combination of elements listed above. To continue my trend of relief, I declared myself the designated driver, something which I would not have been able to do had I, for example, been compelled to witness an air controller/lion tamer/postal service worker's jock strap.
On the pajamas, one last word: Earlier in the week, Michelle and I had been discussing the potential wearing of the pajamas, and whether we would. From the first, I was adamant: I refused to wear something in which I could not make a quick escape, if need be -- not only to this play, but in life.
"It's like the bath," I told Michelle. "I won't take baths. If you needed to make a quick getaway while you were in the bath, you couldn't. You'd be supine, and if you tried to get up fast, you'd definitely slip and crack your head open. Plus you'd be wet and naked. Not good for rapid getaways."
She had just stared at me.
These pajama-wearing people, however, proved me wrong. They made a rapid -- yea, terrified -- retreat wearing those pajamas. I am beginning to think that maybe, upon my return to San Francisco, the time might finally be ripe for a bath.
1 comments:
Michaelangelo didn't bathe, and he wore boots to bed.
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