Clareified

A couple of months ago I had a job interview with this guy who knows Karol. At the end, we had some follow up stuff to take care of, but he worked in a random part of Manhattan and I’m lazy, so it was unclear how we would resolve it. Finally, he says “oh, you know what? I’ll just see you at Karol’s birthday party.”
“Yeah, cool.”
And we left it at that. Indeed that’s how Karol rolls; in the middle of winter two veritable strangers can pretty much bank on her throwing herself a huge shindig in early spring for her annual passing of the year party. So, I kind of laughed to myself when she said in early April that she wasn’t doing anything for her birthday this year. Of course, as the weeks went by, that became “I’m not doing much for my birthday.” “Not much” evidently meaning a trip to Florid-a and a party at some midtown Jamaican club. Then, at some point during my evening, I got a text saying the party had moved from the easily findable midtown location to some behind-god’s-back Alphabet City location. Alceste very kindly drew me a map of downtown Manhattan and some other members of the Wall Street game chipped in with suggestions to get from the totally closed off one way street hell that is Wall Street to the nightmarish pimple on the city’s buttock that Alphabet City is…Fortunately, Fred was feeling cooperative and we managed to get to the party in one piece and pretty much on time.
I was driving to Philly the next day, so I wasn’t drinking at all. I walked to the bar and followed Karol back to a teeny tiny room in the basement. It was small…like holding cell small, with benches around the perimeter. There was a disco ball on the ceiling and then, right there in the center of the room…a stripper pole.
What the —
“No, no…it’s not a strip club,” she said.
“Um…dude, I don’t know what you had in mind, but I am not getting up there!”
Not many people had arrived, so I sat there chatting with her and her boyfriend and her friend from Iraq and his wife.
The thing about Karol’s birthday parties is that it’s the one day a year I get to put faces to all the crazy Brooklyn Russian stories I hear the rest of the year and then I have to practice making sure my “ohh yeaaah, that’s that crazy guy!” face comes off as my everyday run-of-the-mill “Why yes, that anecdote was just fascinating” face.
There was, evidently, a lull in the conversation for I suddenly found myself standing on the stage and dancing around the pole, while Karol laughed and took pictures.
Later, when MR and his girlfriend arrived and asked whether Karol would be pole dancing, she was like “no The I.C. forbids it and he is trained in fourteen ways to kill a woman without leaving prints, but Dawn was up there earlier…you missed it!”
MR was all “wait, are there pictures?”
And I said “well, there are, but they are on my camera because I know if they were on Karol’s camera, pretty much every day would be “here’s a picture of Dawn dancing on a pole day” over on Alarming News. She’d be like….”yawn, today is Friday, I am lazy. The song of the day is ‘Hella Good’ by Gwen Stefani and oh, here’s a picture of Dawn dancing on the pole.”
MR laughed.
“Yeah, and for major holidays too…it’d be “Happy Fourth of July, and here’s a picture of Dawn dancing on the pole.”
“HAHAHAH and then for Yom Kippur she’d be like “on this the holy day of atonement, it is my duty as a Jew to show you a picture of Dawn dancing on a pole,” he said.
“Exactly!” I said cradling my precious, precious camera in my hands.
“You will never leave my side.”
The party started to fill up around 11:30. Ari mocked the fact that she and the pope were now on nickname bases, the cutest couple I ever did see (their initials are M&M for goodness sakes!) said “uh, you don’t know us very well,” and shattered much of my faith in the institution of marriage and then Ron Lad and half of the Entourage boys showed up with surprisingly full heads of hair. And then Pheeelepopokok showed up with a surprisingly clean shaven face!
“Heeey! They’ve got your face hair on their heads!” I said.
I bade my farewells at around midnight, as I was driving to Philly to see the Mets the next day.
“Why are you driving to Philly for a Mets game,” pheel asked.
“Mmmunno, the tickets were free.”
“Free? You know what you’re going to pay for gas getting down there? They play in Queens! Two bucks on the subway, look into it.”
Karol posted this picture of us on facebook and said it is the best either of us has ever looked.

I don’t know about that, but it explains why she was hitting on me all night, in front of everybody. It was just shameful. Someone please tell her I don’t think of her that way.
Plus, I still maintain this is the best we ever looked.

Happy Birthday, Red.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.