Saturday, November 22nd, 2003
Such a Party Pauper
Last night I went to a party. Rob, a friend of Stewie (who I will now refer to as Mr. Chris), works at an advertising agency called Rethink. They did the PlayLand ads, you may recall. When Mr. Chris asked me along I was unsure, but in line with my relatively recent philosophy of “getting out more” I acceded. When we arrived there was a strange rigamarole with different colour nametags and “upgrading” from grey to other colours, and “Schmooze ‘n Win” contests and whatnot - none of which I was the least bit interested in. The issue was clouded even more since I couldn’t understand what the host was trying to say through his tremendous accent/speech impediment (I don’t mean to be cruel but I actually couldn’t tell which he had, if not both). After being told once, and asking for clarification twice, I gave up and just followed Mr. Chris’ lead. As it turns out, upgrading to different colour name tags allowed you access to special shooters, and the prize for the schmooze contest - whereby you had to find out a bunch of stuff from people at the party to fill out the form - was a night at the Opus Hotel. Once I knew what the payoffs were for the rigamarole I was suddenly still not interested. It was one of those parties where the music is so loud you can’t hear what the people you’re trying to chat with are saying. They even turned it up halfway through the party when they caught on that too many people were having interesting conversations and actually getting to know one another. But at times I did get to chat with Rob and Edna and Chirs and Linn and some guy who apparently knew me as a coworker from Duthies. The free food was amazing, and, being a starving artist, was really the selling point of the party for me, having been eating ramen and tomato soup for the past week. I wanted to pull a Dan Aykroyd in the Santa Suit from Trading Places, it was so good. I wish I was there right now.