zoo party

This crazy old rich guy built a private zoo downtown just for whales and dragons. On cleaning day, he had a party. People would sit in the viewing galleries and watch as workers drained the whale pool and scrubbed down the walls of the dragon cages. Then there would be a parade through the city streets as the animals were carted back from their temporary holding facility. For this particular cleaning day party, the guest list included me and everyone I used to date. Everyone got pretty drunk in the viewing gallery, so I popped open one of the windows into the side of the empty whale pool and climbed down inside. It looked like an old city pool, just ten times deeper and so wide I could barely see the other side. The bottom and sides of the pool were lined with light brown tiles and skylights shot down beams of sunlight at random angles. I sat in one corner, breathing in the slightly fishy air, until alarms went off to signal they were going to fill the pool back up and dump the whales back in. I rejoined the party, which had moved up to the roof so everyone could lean over the edges for a glance of the purple and red dragons being carted down Broadway.

escaping, cheating, celebritizing

I had to attend an event for work at the President's Club, some sort of exclusive secret society where celebrities come to watch variety shows at the top of a fancy hotel.

We came with Matt Lauer, who was having a hard time getting in. He kept saying, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Matt Lauer!"

The people at the door shrugged. "To be honest," one of them said, "I don't think you're famous enough, Matt." I had to help some people carry in some equipment from the van, but when I got back we were clear for entry, so Matt must have demonstrated enough celebrity credentials, or paid off the bouncers.

Upstairs, the room was packed with famous people, but not the ones you would necessarily expect. I saw Mariah Carey, and George Clooney (actually, he probably is one of the ones you'd expect). I didn't recognize the rest of the people, but I assumed they were famous for things I didn't know about. I haven't been keeping up with People and US Weekly lately.

All that famous in one place kind of freaked me out. It freaked out my coworker, too. We decided to make an early exit, but we were worried people would see us and realize we weren't famous. We knew that would mean big trouble. Unfortunately, the elevators would only come if you had a registered celebrity ID, so we were kind of stuck. We stood by the elevator bank looking around nervously until another celebrity arrived and we were able to slip into the elevator as he got out.

I was so happy when we got out of that place. But then I ran into my friend, who confessed to me that she was cheating on her boyfriend with the guy I'm dating. I couldn't tell if she knew I was dating him, but I acted supportive anyway. "You're just doing what's right for you," I said. In truth, I was really mad at her. Her boyfriend is a great guy, and I couldn't understand why she would ever do that to him. It seemed very out of character for her.

Only later did it occur to me that I should have been mad at her for sleeping with my boyfriend.