Thursday, December 05, 2002

Today's Hoot!
(Via Whacking Day) To avoid messy keyboard accidents, please finish your morning coffee (or whatever you're drinking in your timezone) before paying a visit to LittleTinyWit.com. Some excerpts from Pimped by the Etiquette Queen
By the way, a really snotty, trashy paralegal got me fired from my first clerking job, and her husband is on the state's sexual predator site, which is real. I have no idea what he did wrong, apart from marrying beneath him. I heard some story about him lunging at a babysitter, but if his wife's picture was also on the predator site, you might understand the temptation.
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All right, you know my friend Claudia. We take salsa lessons together, and we take martial arts classes where we straddle each other and practice applying pressure to each other's forbidden regions and basically do everything Ann Landers says not to do in her dating guide for teens. Well, Claudia has a friend whose name I am not allowed to mention, because I plan to use this column to rip her an assortment of new ones. I'll just call her "Weezy," because her only goal in life is "Movin' on Up."

Weezy runs an etiquette school in Coral Gables. You don't realize how funny that is, because you have never been exposed to her astounding lack of breeding. Claudia's mother forced her to attend classes, in a futile effort to tame her.

Like a lot of nouveau riche social climbing weasels, Weezy has pals over at Vizcaya, and the pals were planning a fund-raiser. The idea went like this: invite 700 really pretentious, fairly well-off people to Vizcaya, charge them $500 each for rubber chicken and Ketel One, and then hit them up for even more money before the buzz wears off.

Weezy called Claudia a month or two ago and asked her if she wanted to go to a big party at Vizcaya. Claudia likes parties, and she likes meeting rich men almost as much as I like meeting easy women, so she accepted. Fine, said Weezy, having set the hook, but you'll have to spend part of the time working as a volunteer, greeting the stiffs as they waddle into the building to be plucked. No problem.

A couple of weeks before the party, Claudia invited me. As I understood it, she needed an escort so she wouldn't end up standing around talking to the plants. Apart from that, all I heard were the words "booze," "food," and "free," so I agreed to go. I was the natural choice, since I was the only man Claudia knew who owned a Tux and knew how to tie a bowtie.
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Kim and Weezy led us around and started telling us what they needed us to do. I thought Kim was a volunteer, too, but more about that later. Apparently, we were supposed to spend like AN HOUR AND A HALF greeting the pigeons, and we would have to STAND. My feeling about standing is that you should only do it during armed robberies and prostate exams. Then we'd have to hover by the stairs leading to the dessert table, to prevent the by-then plastered cash cows from falling and injuring their check-writing hands.
Things went downhill from there.