Babble, babble, babble

Good grief, I had a dream about Buffy last night. It started as a Kevin Costner movie about hiding Jews in a convent during WWII (though Kevin Costner never actually made an appearance, though he was seen on the video cover dressed like Lawrence of Arabia), and Buffy was a student at this seminary that looked like where my dad teaches, and she must have been a TA because someone said she has office hours at midnight, and Willow and I were trying to get to her office without anyone knowing that was where we were going or that we didn't know our way around or that we were both going there together. Our doing so had something to do with the hidden Jews in the convent.

I finished rereading In This House of Brede yesterday, so it's clear where the nuns came from, and my mind has had a serious influx of Buffy over the last three weeks or so, and I was at my dad's school earlier this week, but Kevin Costner?? Where did that come from?

It irks me that I had a Buffy dream and Giles was not present. At least Willow was there. (True to form, in the Buffyverse I have fallen for The Old Smart Guy (With British Isles Accent!) and The Secondary Girl (With Red Hair!))

I have got to go shopping for shoes for R & L's wedding today. As I am still in my pajamas and have eaten nothing but prozac and tea, I've got quite a way to go.

Scenes from the Escapades of Six Bachelorettes in New Orleans!

So there I was, in the hotel room, blowing up lubricated condoms and sticking slips of paper with instructions like 'Get a guy to buy you a Sex on the Beach' in them when a bright light started flashing, a siren wailed, and then a recorded voice began to proclaim "Attention! Attention! An emergency has been reported in the building! While it is being verified, please proceed out of the building by the stairs!"

(As I said to L later... "So there are Beccah and me, the resident virgins, blowing up brightly colored lubricated condoms while Miss Sexual Experience is in the other hotel room watching an Olsen twins vehicle on cable and Miss Maid-of-Honor-Who-Came-Up-With-This-Idea stands by to assemble the condom bouquet... and then some dork pulls the fire alarm so we can all start thinking about terrorist attacks." Though really, I can't imagine that the French Quarter Holiday Inn is much of a terrorist target, or New Orleans for that matter. Even though the cityis currently hosting International Powwow, which has large purple posters and is apparently the yearly convention for travel agents.)

So there were five of us, eating Cheeseburgers in Paradise(tm) or in my case a Jamaican Jerk Chicken Sandwich and drinking margaritas at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville (which has possibly the most frighteningly overdecorated restrooms of any establishment I have ever entered... really, I don't need outsize painted technicolor parrots watching me in the stall.) I was one of two not eating the pickle that came with every meal. Beccah and Monika, who, the weekend made apparent, must have been separated at birth, were going into raptures about dill pickles. But at that moment a rift developed between them, for Beccah did contend that pickles are not cucumbers, while Monika insisted (along with the rest of us) that pickles are cucumbers that have been pickled. "I've had this argument many times," Beccah said. "Everyone is wrong." When the waiter came to check on us (perhaps because we were arguing so vehemently,) I said, "We need you to settle a question of biology." (My mother subsequently pointed out that it is, of course, an issue of botany, but in the partially margarita-induced heat of the moment I said biology. Truth in reporting, and all that.) He agreed that pickles cannot be plucked from pickle plants. Beccah remained unconvinced. We gave up, remembering that this is a woman who irons her pajamas, and allowances must be made for the mentally ill.

So there was L, the bride-to-be, strolling down Bourbon Street in a kicky little black skirt, a lovely pale-tangerine top, black sandals, and a veil her cousin Monika had decorated with inflated condoms and small plastic penises, when a guy grabbed one of the condoms on the veil and asked if he could have it. L said he could. He removed it, untied the knot in it, and told us (the Six Bachelorettes, though I think we had been reduced to four by that point) that he was going to snort it up his nose and pull it out his mouth. He made several attempts, and even dropped the condom in his beer to lubricate it more, but ultimately gave up because, he said, his fingernails were not long enough to grab it from the back of his throat. As a consolation gag, he put on the condom like a hat, pulled it down so it covered his nose, and then inflated it by breathing in through his mouth and out through his nose until the thing popped. "I feel like I'm eighteen again and out with my rugby mates!" he crowed.

Then there was the part in which I made L take a picture of the giant neon Walgreens sign on Canal St., and the part in which Beccah tried to charm the crew on the Creole Queen into letting her run out on the bowsprit to do the Titanic "I'm king of the world!", and the moment at which we discovered that reason you see people walking all over the French Quarter carrying paper cups from Pat O'Brien's is that Pat O'Brien's hurricanes are so vile-tasting that they are actually impossible to drink. Monika and I tried, but as I said at the time, "If I wanted to stick a straw in a bottle of rum, I'd stick a straw in a bottle of rum."