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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Over the weekend, the missus and I attended a special holiday gala. It was sponsored by a local arts group, and featured live entertainment, a wine tasting and hobnobbing with all manner of cultured neighborly types.
(At least, I think we ‘hobnobbed’. I’m not entirely sure where my ‘hob’ is, or how I’m supposed to ‘knob’ it, honestly. It sounds like the sort of thing I shouldn’t be doing in public. Or with the neighbors. And yet, here we are.)
The highlight of the evening, however, was the silent auction. While the rest of the festivities were ongoing, we were encouraged to bid on various bits of donated goodies — theater tickets, dinner packages, paintings, concert tickets, even a baseball autographed by Red Sox third baseman Mike Lowell.
That last one is a non-artsy bone thrown to the riff-raff who always seem to wind up weaseling into these sorts of highbrow fetes. You can’t expect all of the local residents to be refined enough to appreciate the finer things in life.
As the token unrefined weaseling riff-raff — who also happens to be a huge baseball fan — I couldn’t possibly appreciate this more. I even sipped my wine with my pinky out for the rest of the night in support. I’m all about meeting people halfway.
Sadly, I was overruled in my bid for the ball early on by my wife, who informed me that the bidding had already gone out of our rather limited price range. Evidently, I wasn’t the only undercultured heathen in attendance. Seeing my disappointment, she told me to have a look around the auction items, and if I saw something within reason, to place a bid.
That’s when things went downhill like a Josh Beckett fastball.
Eggs. Also? Pepper!
I walked around a bit, and found a nice painting entitled Eggs and Pepper. I thought it would look great in our dining room. That’s the picture over there on the right.
I appreciated the composition. I appreciated the subtle palette. And I especially appreciated that a painting titled Eggs and Pepper contained obvious representations of both eggs and pepper. I don’t like to work too damned hard for my art.
So I decided to go for it.
A Gentleman’s Bid
Now, I’ve never attended a silent auction before. But I’ve seen auctions occasionally in those newfangled moving pictures and televisional type programs. If you want to make a bid, you raise your hand to let someone know. That’s how it works. So that’s what I did.
(I figured the ‘silent’ part just meant that they had done away with the jackass in the bolo tie behind a podium screaming, ‘Cannagettatwenny? Twennyoverhere, cannagettatwennyfie? Twennyfie, twennyfie, no twennyfie… twennyonce! Tweenytwie! Sooool!!!‘ And thank god for that.)
As subtly as possible, like an old auction pro, I lifted a finger to indicate my interest, as you can see here. I was frankly quite proud of myself in my big boy suit.
Little Bid Over Here?
Ten minutes later, I was still standing there with my finger waggling in the breeze. People were starting to give me funny looks, but there was no indication that anyone had registered my bid.
Clearly, it was time to step things up.
I recalled that when I’d seen auctions on TV before, the more hoity-toity bidders would sometimes hold aloft a paddle of some kind to get the auctioneer’s attention. I didn’t have a paddle, of course. That would be too easy.
Luckily, I brought a spatula. That’s called ‘planning ahead’, people.
‘Silent’ No Longer
Another five minutes, and I was running out of ideas. The finger didn’t work. The spatula didn’t work. And now there were people opening staring and pointing at me.
Story of my sex life.
So, I did what I always do when this situation comes up in bed.
I got louder, and a little belligerent. That ‘silent’ part of ‘silent auction’ is just a suggestion, right?
Who’s Running This Thing?
Well, that didn’t work, either.
And I didn’t see anybody anywhere jotting down bids. Just a bunch of shiraz-slurping suburbanites looking uncomfortable and backing slowly away from me.
On the good side, that meant they were backing away from my painting, too. But what good does that do, if my bid was going unheeded? If a bid falls alone in the forest, does anyone hear it? Is it better to bid than to receive? Can you bid me now?
Who the hell is running this stupid auction, anyway?
Nobody Here But Us Eggs & Peppers
This was approximately the time at which I was asked to put down the painting and leave. I went peacefully, with some small shred of my dignity left.
Because I knew they left the back door open.
When the coast was clear, I took one last stab at procuring my picture. Like a ninja, I was. A camouflaged ninja. But they found me, anyway. And escorted me out of the building, again. A tad more enthusiastically, this time.
Who knew a wine tasting soiree would have actual bouncers? This is how we learn.
Thanks, Honey!
At that point, I gave up. Which meant calling my wife, and explaining why I was stuffed upside down in a garbage can in the parking lot. She listened, and informed me that in a silent auction, you write your bids in a little notebook beside each item. Neat. I wondered what that notebook was for.
Then she said she’d be out to rescue me. In thirty minutes or so. An hour, tops.
Ninety minutes later, she pulled me out of the muck and put me on my feet. Also, she had a surprise — with all the commotion around the painting inside, it turns out no one had bothered to make an actual bid. So she jotted down her name, waited out the auction, and wound up as the winner.
To the right, I’ve taken a post-party victory shot with the picture. It’s not my finest — or most photogenic — moment, perhaps, but like they say:
‘Auction’s well that ends well.‘
‘Eggs and Pepper’ — going once. Going twice. Sooooool!!!
Permalink | 6 CommentsMy shower curtain is equipped with a force field.
I realize that’s not an especially sane-sounding thing to say. Reading that, you might expect me to be the sort of person who checks the ‘matrix’ for deja vu glitches, or asks people to ‘use the Force’, or writes Trekkie fanfic in his spare time. In fact, I do none of these things.
(Deja vu creeps me out enough as it is, the ‘Force’ is for babies and Tatooine tarot readers, and when it comes to Star Trek, I wouldn’t know my ass from an Uhura in the ground.
“At this point, my money is on Beelzebub making snow angels and sipping hot chocolate before I come through, but hey — anything could happen.”
In the interest of full disclosure, I know who Tasha Yar was, and which nasty thing she did during the Enterprise series.
But that doesn’t make me a Trekkie. At worst, it makes me a Denise Crosby stalker. And I’m certainly not going to write about that. Good grief.)
Anyway, I’ve got no goofy delusions that my shower curtain can deflect laser cannons or photon torpedoes or anything like that. I harbor serious doubts that it could repel the Gou’ald, keep Dalek hordes at bay, or make the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.
(Particularly because the parsec is a unit of distance, not of time. Also, because the shower curtain is an eight-foot-by-six-foot hunk of cotton.
If it were nylon, maybe we could talk. But cotton? Jedi, please.)
My science fiction dorkitude aside, there’s still something oddly force-fieldish about this curtain, and I’ll tell you why: when I’m outside the shower, I have all sorts of random thoughts. Some are mundane, some are disturbing, and some are possibly plans for that long-overdue PG-13 Tasha Yar fanfic the world has been holding its collective breath for. You don’t know; could be anything.
These thoughts, the outside-the-shower ones, I carry around with me, mulling over, discarding, forgetting and remembering, doing all the sorts of things that one normally does with one’s thoughts.
Meanwhile, there’s the time I spend inside the shower. And, as far as I can recollect, I have thoughts in there, too. I distinctly remember having thoughts in the shower. Good thoughts. Bad thoughts. Soggy thoughts. I just can’t remember what the hell any of them were, because as soon as I step out of said shower, and past the curtain:
*poof*
Gone.
I am absolutely physically unable to entertain any sort of notion, of any kind, in the interior of my shower, and then successfully exit the shower with that thought still in my brain. Can’t be done. Unpossible. A recent and maddening case in point:
I have been out of shampoo for over a week now. At least nine days, possibly more. And conceivably forever. The only evidence I have that I ever used my own shampoo is a hazy, shower curtain-diluted memory of rubbing something frothy into my hair. Might have been shampoo, might have been toothpaste. Could have been cappuccino, for all I know. I only vaguely remember lathering, rinsing and repeating; whether my head was then minty clean, or in need of cream and two lumps of sugar, I can’t say. It’s the damned shower curtain. I’m under its spell.
The second-worst part about this thought-wiping monstrosity is that it prevents me from actually finding shampoo to put into the shower for myself. I get into the shower, blissfully unaware that my shampoo is AWOL. I spend fifteen minutes cleaning myself up, chewing myself out, and toweling myself down, all the while resolving to grab a bottle of shampoo as soon as I leave the damned shower.
Then *sssssshhhhhppppttttt*, I open the curtain, step out into the bathroom, and… uh… what am I doing here again? Why am I naked? And wet? Is this one of those alien abductions I’ve heard about? And can we forgo the anal probe part of the program, please? Surely, you interstellar jackholes have caressed your share of colons by now. Buy an anatomy book, already. Jeez.
And so, I get dressed and go on my merry way for the next twenty-four hours, until I find myself back in the bathroom, soggy and soapy and suddenly enlightened, staring at the empty bit of shower shelf where my shampoo used to sit. And the circle of stupidity rolls on.
But yesterday morning, I finally found the answer.
First, I should mention that I’m only out of my shampoo in the shower. Luckily for me, my wife shares the facility, and so I do have a backup shampooing plan to fall back on. I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve been neglecting my hair care of late, thanks to this nefarious and diabolical shower curtain villain. Not at all. I’ve simply been ‘borrowing’ the missus’ shampoo, until such time as I remember to resupply my own.
Or until hell freezes over, whichever comes first. At this point, my money is on Beelzebub making snow angels and sipping hot chocolate before I come through, but hey — anything could happen.
And yesterday, I set destiny in motion. That morning, after forgetting — again — to bring shampoo to the shower, I resolved to remember, no matter what. Curtain be damned, I would somehow smuggle the thought of picking up shampoo from inside the shower to the outside world. And so, I wrote myself a message. On the shower wall. Using my wife’s shampoo. ‘REMEMBER TO PICK UP SHAMPOO‘, it read. Stretched all the way around the tub, too.
And did it help? Did I finally, mercifully remember to restock my supply?
No. Thirty seconds out of the shower, and I was busy dressing and brushing and rushing to work, heedless of the brilliant foamy note I’d left myself. Clueless doofus, thy name is Charlie.
Still, my plan did have the intended effect, in a way. Because now — thanks to my carefully scrawled message — now my wife is out of shampoo, too. And seemingly immune to the dastardly effects of the shower curtain, because when I checked this morning, there was a bright, shiny new bottle of her shampoo in the tub. Right next to a full bottle of mine. Seems the trick here is to find someone who has an attention span longer than your average hummingbird fart, and let them do your dirty work.
Thank goodness. I was just about to go at the shower curtain with a light saber or a flamethrower or something. That would have been even tougher to explain than how the walls got smeared with Aussie shampoo.
And only slightly easier to explain than why my head’s smelled like a flowery kangaroo pouch for the last fortnight or more. Either way, I blame the curtain. Or Darth Vader. Take your pick.
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