Rain Man
04-09-2006, 12:44 PM
My wife and I went to a "gala" last night, which is shorthand for "an event where you pay through the nose for an institutional meal at a hotel while listening to people speak about stuff that you don't really care about." This one was for a child care organization, and as I try to make really clear to people, I do not care for children, so child care is to me an alien concept. However, my wife knew some people, so I gave up my Saturday to sit around and eat some sort of unidentifiable steak cut.
This event was beset with the same drawbacks of most of these these types of events, in that I had to make small talk with strange people, and listen to speeches by people I don't know about people I don't know, and tearful superlatives about children that I would push to the ground if they were between me and a bowl of queso dip. However, it had four positives going for it that made it more tolerable than most.
First and foremost, it was a cleavage event. I'm not sure what the actual name of the dress code is, but basically it called for all of the women at the event to wear very low-cut cocktail outfits that produced cleavage that would result in the woman being killed by enraged muslims in many parts of the world. Since this was a child care organization, many of the guests were young and eager and pert and perky, and so were the people behind the breasts. It was definitely the best cleavage event I've attended in a while, since most of them tend to be dominated by the over-50 set(s).
Second, they had a silent auction. Silent auctions are always cool, even though I never win anything and this one was offset by a painful live auction that is always awkward and annoying.
Third, there was this old guy with bad hair who dressed like Don Johnson, or maybe Tubbs, of Miami Vice, and he was scoping out the cleavage pretty heavily. He was fun to watch. Also, there were two women who were wearing dresses so short that they looked like hookers, and not the kind of hookers who are strung out on coke or meth, but rather hookers who don't have a great fashion sense but make up for it by wearing skin-tight extremely short dresses that accentuate the curves that they're selling to buy their first hits of coke and meth.
And fourth...fourth (insert angels singing Handel's Messiah here)...over in the corner, in a quiet spot, was The Raffle. The Raffle included a 52-inch HDTV, surroundsound speakers, a stereo system, an Xbox system, and tons of other things with plug-ins and speakers that I didn't recognize. Retail value: $8,979.
I made a beeline to The Raffle. Kind of a beeline. It was actually more of a bee path, flitting from location to location to check out the cleavage and the almost-hookers, and doing that little bee-dance to mark their locations for future visits. Anyway, the bee-path eventually led me to The Raffle.
"How much?" I asked.
"$75 per ticket," said the woman in the low-cut dress who was handling The Raffle.
"What are the odds?"
She leaned in close to me, so close that I could see down between her taffeta-clad bosom. "We've sold less than a hundred tickets so far," she murmured. "It's really good odds."
I looked at my wife. She looked at me. I knew that this was my Kursk, my crossing of the Delaware. I could feel the luck emanating from my pores.
"I'm going for it," I said.
I whipped out my credit card and handed it to the woman, who gave it to another woman, who leaned over in her low-cut gown to process it, which I think was intended to be a little bit of a bonus for me. Oh, yeah. It was going to happen for me tonight. Big-screen heaven for $75. I could feel it in my bones. (I said "bones", and this has nothing to do with the cleavage.)
I got my ticket. It was a lucky ticket. Number 308600. A nice even number. I felt good about it, as we weaved our way back through the crowd. Don Johnson was working his magic on a pair of willowy half-Asian sisters who should be on television, and I knew that I was going to be luckier than him tonight.
We took our seats, and sat through the dinner at the crowded little table. Someone took my water glass and drank from it accidentally. I envisioned myself going to the podium to accept my prize, and I practiced my acceptance speech. I decided to go with this: "Thank you very much, and here is my pledge to you. I WILL watch every NFL game that is televised this year. That is my promise and my vow, and I will do it for the children."
I wasn't sure about the children part, but I figured that I'd play it be ear once I got up there.
Don Johnson was over on my left. The tables were assigned ahead of time, and he had drawn the table with the two hooker wannabes. Nonetheless, I still thought that winning the entertainment system would be better. I'm not sure at all how one of those young ladies was able to sit down without showing her Basic Instinct, but I couldn't position myself in the right spot to drop change and pick it up.
The live auction started. The pain was immense. It was like being in a room in the room when the veterinarian is telling the farmer that the calf is being born sideways; you really, really want to be somewhere else. Their first item for sale was a framed drawing by one of the organization's children, and they were asking $1,000 for it. Everybody was pretending to be hunched over their food, concentrating every fiber of their soul on the green beans, counting them like Rain Man (the other Rain Man) counted toothpicks. Someone finally paid $1,000 for it, and then they sold a hockey stick signed by some guy that I didn't recognize for $1,200. I decided that I would go up the side of the room to collect my big screen TV, rather than up the middle where the wiring for the lights and the microphone were.
Number 308600. I imagined my grin growing bigger as each number was called. Would I leap into the air with a big "woohoo!"? Or would I merely smile a wry grin, and raise the ticket in the air?
The live auction ended, and so did the silent auction. My wife won a couple of things in the silent auction, so we went to pay for them. We got in line behind a drunk guy in his fifties, and Don Johnson came up to the guy. There were words. The drunk guy was apologizing for something. I couldn't hear what was going on, in part because I never hear anything anyone says at these events because I can never hear over the background noise, and in part because of all the cleavage in the immediate vicinity, which was causing non-essential parts of my body to shut down so that more blood could flow to my eyes. When the words ended, Don Johnson left and the drunk guy wandered off. I asked my wife what went down. She told me that the two wannabe hookers were actually Don Johnson's daughters, which now that I know it could never have been otherwise, and the drunk had apparently made a comment to one of them that could have possibly been perceived as something one would say to a hooker.
I mean, seriously. One of these gals had the shortest dress I've ever seen in real life. Even my wife was telling me to check her out, and my wife isn't into threesomes or anything. She's just a good wife.
My lord. The women at the checkout booth might as well be topless. I love these cleavage galas. I love them!
So we get our stuff from the silent auction, and we go back and they're about to do the drawing to give me my big entertainment center. I pull out my raffle ticket, lucky number 308600, and I set it on the table. I rub my finger on it for luck, and my wife, without any prompting on my part, does the same. I check my zipper to make sure that I'm zipped up, because it would be embarrassing to go up there with a dark suit and have my bright blue underwear flashing through like a woodpecker peeking out of a knothole.
They bring up the tickets. They're in a big bowler hat.
The drawing is made by a local sportscaster and a singer in a local band. They bring up a rich child who's the daughter of a big contributor, and they let her draw the number. It takes a long time, and for some reason that no one can figure out, the singer guy has his hand in the hat for a long, long time. The sportscaster tells him to get out, and the rich child draws the number.
I tense up in my seat.
3
I'm still not sure if I should go with the "I'll do it for the children" line or not.
0
Maybe I'll sell the Xbox. I don't really have much use for it.
8
I don't know. Maybe I should keep it. I check my zipper again.
5
What?
9
Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
8.
Some mousy middle-aged women up in the front raises her hand, and goes up to the stage. They're checking her ticket, and this whole thing is a bad dream. It was off by two. There has to be some mistake.
They confirm that the woman has won the entertainment center, and I know that she's going to use it to watch Touched by an Angel and Larry King Live and the Oxygen Channel, and it's just not right to use a big-screen TV that way. I'll bet that she doesn't even know what an Xbox is. I really wanted that Xbox.
It feels as though everyone is laughing at me: Don Johnson and his hooker daughters, the winsome half-Asian sisters, the guy at my table who looks like Christopher Reeve before the accident, and all of the women at the silent auction checkout booth, their breasts heaving and wobbling to and fro as they point and tilt their heads back.
But then I remembered the whole purpose of this event. My $75 raffle ticket wasn't just a gambling event to win a prize that was stolen from me by that skinny, cackling old lady. It was a donation that will be used to fund a new building for the child care organization, to provide a safe and pleasant place for the next generation to learn and play, and that made me feel worse than ever. Dang it. I never win anything.
This event was beset with the same drawbacks of most of these these types of events, in that I had to make small talk with strange people, and listen to speeches by people I don't know about people I don't know, and tearful superlatives about children that I would push to the ground if they were between me and a bowl of queso dip. However, it had four positives going for it that made it more tolerable than most.
First and foremost, it was a cleavage event. I'm not sure what the actual name of the dress code is, but basically it called for all of the women at the event to wear very low-cut cocktail outfits that produced cleavage that would result in the woman being killed by enraged muslims in many parts of the world. Since this was a child care organization, many of the guests were young and eager and pert and perky, and so were the people behind the breasts. It was definitely the best cleavage event I've attended in a while, since most of them tend to be dominated by the over-50 set(s).
Second, they had a silent auction. Silent auctions are always cool, even though I never win anything and this one was offset by a painful live auction that is always awkward and annoying.
Third, there was this old guy with bad hair who dressed like Don Johnson, or maybe Tubbs, of Miami Vice, and he was scoping out the cleavage pretty heavily. He was fun to watch. Also, there were two women who were wearing dresses so short that they looked like hookers, and not the kind of hookers who are strung out on coke or meth, but rather hookers who don't have a great fashion sense but make up for it by wearing skin-tight extremely short dresses that accentuate the curves that they're selling to buy their first hits of coke and meth.
And fourth...fourth (insert angels singing Handel's Messiah here)...over in the corner, in a quiet spot, was The Raffle. The Raffle included a 52-inch HDTV, surroundsound speakers, a stereo system, an Xbox system, and tons of other things with plug-ins and speakers that I didn't recognize. Retail value: $8,979.
I made a beeline to The Raffle. Kind of a beeline. It was actually more of a bee path, flitting from location to location to check out the cleavage and the almost-hookers, and doing that little bee-dance to mark their locations for future visits. Anyway, the bee-path eventually led me to The Raffle.
"How much?" I asked.
"$75 per ticket," said the woman in the low-cut dress who was handling The Raffle.
"What are the odds?"
She leaned in close to me, so close that I could see down between her taffeta-clad bosom. "We've sold less than a hundred tickets so far," she murmured. "It's really good odds."
I looked at my wife. She looked at me. I knew that this was my Kursk, my crossing of the Delaware. I could feel the luck emanating from my pores.
"I'm going for it," I said.
I whipped out my credit card and handed it to the woman, who gave it to another woman, who leaned over in her low-cut gown to process it, which I think was intended to be a little bit of a bonus for me. Oh, yeah. It was going to happen for me tonight. Big-screen heaven for $75. I could feel it in my bones. (I said "bones", and this has nothing to do with the cleavage.)
I got my ticket. It was a lucky ticket. Number 308600. A nice even number. I felt good about it, as we weaved our way back through the crowd. Don Johnson was working his magic on a pair of willowy half-Asian sisters who should be on television, and I knew that I was going to be luckier than him tonight.
We took our seats, and sat through the dinner at the crowded little table. Someone took my water glass and drank from it accidentally. I envisioned myself going to the podium to accept my prize, and I practiced my acceptance speech. I decided to go with this: "Thank you very much, and here is my pledge to you. I WILL watch every NFL game that is televised this year. That is my promise and my vow, and I will do it for the children."
I wasn't sure about the children part, but I figured that I'd play it be ear once I got up there.
Don Johnson was over on my left. The tables were assigned ahead of time, and he had drawn the table with the two hooker wannabes. Nonetheless, I still thought that winning the entertainment system would be better. I'm not sure at all how one of those young ladies was able to sit down without showing her Basic Instinct, but I couldn't position myself in the right spot to drop change and pick it up.
The live auction started. The pain was immense. It was like being in a room in the room when the veterinarian is telling the farmer that the calf is being born sideways; you really, really want to be somewhere else. Their first item for sale was a framed drawing by one of the organization's children, and they were asking $1,000 for it. Everybody was pretending to be hunched over their food, concentrating every fiber of their soul on the green beans, counting them like Rain Man (the other Rain Man) counted toothpicks. Someone finally paid $1,000 for it, and then they sold a hockey stick signed by some guy that I didn't recognize for $1,200. I decided that I would go up the side of the room to collect my big screen TV, rather than up the middle where the wiring for the lights and the microphone were.
Number 308600. I imagined my grin growing bigger as each number was called. Would I leap into the air with a big "woohoo!"? Or would I merely smile a wry grin, and raise the ticket in the air?
The live auction ended, and so did the silent auction. My wife won a couple of things in the silent auction, so we went to pay for them. We got in line behind a drunk guy in his fifties, and Don Johnson came up to the guy. There were words. The drunk guy was apologizing for something. I couldn't hear what was going on, in part because I never hear anything anyone says at these events because I can never hear over the background noise, and in part because of all the cleavage in the immediate vicinity, which was causing non-essential parts of my body to shut down so that more blood could flow to my eyes. When the words ended, Don Johnson left and the drunk guy wandered off. I asked my wife what went down. She told me that the two wannabe hookers were actually Don Johnson's daughters, which now that I know it could never have been otherwise, and the drunk had apparently made a comment to one of them that could have possibly been perceived as something one would say to a hooker.
I mean, seriously. One of these gals had the shortest dress I've ever seen in real life. Even my wife was telling me to check her out, and my wife isn't into threesomes or anything. She's just a good wife.
My lord. The women at the checkout booth might as well be topless. I love these cleavage galas. I love them!
So we get our stuff from the silent auction, and we go back and they're about to do the drawing to give me my big entertainment center. I pull out my raffle ticket, lucky number 308600, and I set it on the table. I rub my finger on it for luck, and my wife, without any prompting on my part, does the same. I check my zipper to make sure that I'm zipped up, because it would be embarrassing to go up there with a dark suit and have my bright blue underwear flashing through like a woodpecker peeking out of a knothole.
They bring up the tickets. They're in a big bowler hat.
The drawing is made by a local sportscaster and a singer in a local band. They bring up a rich child who's the daughter of a big contributor, and they let her draw the number. It takes a long time, and for some reason that no one can figure out, the singer guy has his hand in the hat for a long, long time. The sportscaster tells him to get out, and the rich child draws the number.
I tense up in my seat.
3
I'm still not sure if I should go with the "I'll do it for the children" line or not.
0
Maybe I'll sell the Xbox. I don't really have much use for it.
8
I don't know. Maybe I should keep it. I check my zipper again.
5
What?
9
Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
8.
Some mousy middle-aged women up in the front raises her hand, and goes up to the stage. They're checking her ticket, and this whole thing is a bad dream. It was off by two. There has to be some mistake.
They confirm that the woman has won the entertainment center, and I know that she's going to use it to watch Touched by an Angel and Larry King Live and the Oxygen Channel, and it's just not right to use a big-screen TV that way. I'll bet that she doesn't even know what an Xbox is. I really wanted that Xbox.
It feels as though everyone is laughing at me: Don Johnson and his hooker daughters, the winsome half-Asian sisters, the guy at my table who looks like Christopher Reeve before the accident, and all of the women at the silent auction checkout booth, their breasts heaving and wobbling to and fro as they point and tilt their heads back.
But then I remembered the whole purpose of this event. My $75 raffle ticket wasn't just a gambling event to win a prize that was stolen from me by that skinny, cackling old lady. It was a donation that will be used to fund a new building for the child care organization, to provide a safe and pleasant place for the next generation to learn and play, and that made me feel worse than ever. Dang it. I never win anything.