Hat tip to the lovely Metalia for this topic idea….she requested these stories, people, and there were simply too many to put in her comments section.

I was at a wedding a few weeks ago, and several bourbons into the evening, I walked outside to get some air and found one of our friends smoking a cigarette with two of the groom’s nerdy-hip cousins.

“Do you want one?” he asked me, a knowing smile on his face that said “I know you, old and boring person, and there is no way on God’s green earth you’re going to want a cigarette.”

So of course I took one, because I get a little contrary when I’m a few bourbons into the evening.  He gaped at me, disbelieving.

“It’s been a long time,” I said, “but there was a phase.”

“WHEN?” he asked.

“Before I knew you,” I said.  He looked at me, uncomprehending.  (I have known him for 10 years, after all.  But I AM OLD and there was a time before that when I was young and did stupid things, okay?)

So I proceeded to half-smoke the cigarette before I realized I was over it, stubbed it out, went back inside, and felt mortified at my embarrassing show of drunkenness.  This is what drunken antics have become for me, apparently- one ill-considered half-smoked cigarette.  Sigh.

In the old days, though?  HOO BOY.  My friends and I would bust out the TBPs (tight black pants) and head out to parties, returning home with UPIs (unidentified party injuries- I went to a college that liked to abbreviate things, okay?)  and stories of absurd behavior.

• Like the time I recreated my entire high school musical theater tap dance routine…on top of a pool table.  (Low-hanging lamp + double time step = mild concussion!)
• Or the time I knocked on the door of the guy I had a crush on at 2 in the morning, waking him from a dead sleep, to ask if I could borrow some Skittles.  (I was playing it cool, okay?  I would just casually stop by ask if I could borrow some candy-coated chewy fruit candy, a totally normal request, and he would see how lovely and graceful and charming I was and  ask me out on the spot! Or look at me like I had two heads! Either/or!)
• Or (god, I’d almost forgotten this) the time when, egged on by my castmates, I performed my monologue from The Vagina Monologues on a busy thoroughfare with lots of foot traffic for any random soul who happened to be walking by.  This one.  Yeah, the one with all the moaning. Subtle!

I can only be relieved that I was young and in college in a time before cell phones, or the drunk dialing/texting would no doubt have been legendary.  Oh god, and twitter?  Thank my stars.  The last thing the Library of Congress needs is a permanent record of my youthful idiocy.

On Thursday, John called me at work.

I answered. “Hi, what’s wrong? Is everyone okay?”  John does not call me at work often.

“Yes,” he said.  Then, “do we have plans for Saturday?”

“Well, I’m supposed to be going to Dark Lord Day,” I said.  “And we’re running that 5k.”

“Do you have to go to Indiana?” he said.

“No, I guess not, what’s up?” I asked.

“Well, what if I told you that I had tickets to the Blackhawks playoff game?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I just got invited by [company we work with] to go as their guests because we’re good clients.  Actually, they invited [coworker], but he can’t go.  The tickets are in the first row, on the glass.  Do you want to go?”

“Why is that even a question? Absolutely.”

So that’s how I ended up here:

That, my friends, is a non-zoomed photo of Patrick Sharp, standing against the glass about 6 inches from me.  It was nuts.

That Sharp is a class act, too, let me tell you.  A little kid a few seats down from us was wearing a Sharp jersey, and was following Sharp’s every move during warmups with the wide-eyed adoration that only a six-year-old can have.  Sharp saw him and skated over, grinned, and gave the kid a fist bump through the glass.  That kid will remember that for the rest of his life.  Good people, that Sharpie.

The game, for those who may not have caught it, was absolutely ridiculous.  The Hawks dominated for 2 periods, but somehow the Predators tied it and then went ahead in the 3rd period.  Hossa got called for a ridiculous boarding penalty with one minute left so the Hawks were down one goal AND playing short handed.  With FOURTEEN SECONDS LEFT, Patrick Kane scored a goal to tie it and send it into overtime.  Hossa had to sit out the first four minutes of overtime, which caused me to have excruciating nervous tummy.  The Hawks managed to kill the penalty and Hossa skated out of the penalty box and scored the winning goal about fifteen seconds later.  Seriously, it was like something out of a movie.

I have very little interest in or grasp of things like finance and banking, but I must say: I am glad that I am married to someone who works for a company that is a client of such places, because I can tell you with 100% certainty that there is no way my ass would have ever sat on the glass at a Hawks game, let alone a playoff game, otherwise.

Some other observations:

• John has a total mancrush on Patrick Kane.  He insists that he and Kane locked eyes at one point during the game.  I’m trying not to worry that my husband might leave me for an underage be-mulleted hockey player.
• At one point, the Hawks goalie stopped a goal with his gut.  The puck disappeared somewhere into his gear.  It took them over FIVE MINUTES to find it.  That’s a lot of gear, my friends.
• A startling number of women appear to believe that appropriate gear for hockey fans includes sky-high heels and full makeup.  I felt woefully underdressed in my jeans and sneakers.  I’ll know for next time: stripper heels are in!
• Speaking of strippers: the female “ice crew” is an insult to women everywhere.  The end.
• At the first intermission, I told John I think it would be great if our kids play hockey instead of, say, football, because it’s still rough-and-tumble but in a less brutal way.  Then I looked at my program and noticed that the Blackhawks official roster includes four team dentists.  Is competitive youth croquet a thing?  Or perhaps badminton?

Last year, John and I went with our friends Bird and Bama to a concert at a small local venue.  There’s a restaurant attached to the concert hall, so we had dinner first.  The concert was scheduled to start at 7:30, so we went to dinner at 7, thinking that would give us time to eat and roll in at about 8:15, when the concert figured to actually start.  Because, you know, concerts NEVER start on time.

You can see where this is going, yes? We ate dinner, walked into the venue and…the set was 2/3 over.  Turns out, there was a late-night show by a different band starting after the show we were seeing, so they’d started precisely on time.  What we did see was really great, but after about five songs, the show was over.

So I was really excited when I learned that that the artist, Jeffrey Foucault, was coming back into town this spring.  This is a great time of year for live music- bands and musicians are coming out of winter hibernation, gearing up for summer festivals and tours, playing small venues.  I’ve been to half a dozen shows in the past month and a half, and haven’t paid more than $15 for a ticket.  That’s about the same as a movie, folks.

This was one of the shows I was most excited about- I bought tickets for us well in advance, and like the enthusiastic old people that we are we arrived at the concert five minutes before the opening act started, plenty of time to get seats.

And oh, it was so worth it.

I wish there was a way I could write about music without sounding like a trite nitwit, but I haven’t found it.  I love music, but I don’t play well, and I certainly can’t write about it effectively.  Suffice it to say that I can think of few better ways to spend an evening than watching someone who is truly prodigiously talented as a musician doing what they do best.  For example, at the show last night, pretty much every song required a reset of a capo and a retuning of the instrument.  I found myself transfixed by the process, amazed at the years of accumulated practice and skill at playing and songwriting that it must take to be able to write beautiful songs in different keys and to shift back and forth between them effortlessly while making idle chat with the audience.

There’s nothing in the world that I can even come close to doing that well.  I like to consider myself a generalist- I do many things pretty well.  I can cook, for example, and sew.  I’m good at writing, and I’m pretty clever in conversation.  I’m good at pub trivia.  I make a solid cocktail.  But I don’t have deep, amazing skill at any one thing, the way our friend Newton does at low temperature physics, or my friend MEM has at theoretical math, or our friend Dyer has with computers.

I do not have the brain it takes to become a world-class expert in any particular academic field, nor the discipline it takes to become a world-class expert in any hobby or skill.  I am, for the most part, perfectly okay with this.  But sometimes, like Saturday, I watch someone playing absolutely lights-out on the guitar in this effortless, spare, heartbreakingly beautiful way and I wish, just for a moment, that I could do something that well.

The last song of Saturday’s show is one of my favorite songs of all time.  I’m glad we saw the whole set this time, and I’m doubly glad that I finally got to hear him play this song live.  I’ve heard this song dozens of times and it still catches my breath.  It makes me wish I could write poetry, or songs.  I’d highly suggest you check it out.