August 27, 2007

Rehab

This weekend was just the rehabilitation that any stay-at-home Mom needs. I spent the afternoon sitting in a beach chair, watching the waves, surrounded by good friends, good conversation, and good entertainment. . . .like this for example. . . a self-burial job:

Did you know that British men can turn into leprechauns? I sure didn’t. After this little beach stunt, "RV" (the very cool new husband of my very cool friend) went running off to the sea because he said he had, "sand in me pants." You gotta love the British sayings and accent. It’s just so darn cute. Here’s the very happy couple with a bit less sand. . .

After the beach, we had some refreshing drinks on the porch, before being picked up by some crazy cab driver to go to dinner. We went to a very nice restaurant called "Mia" inside one of the resorts nearby.

This is one of the four servers we had while in the restaurant.

Sheila was awesome, right up until she brought the check and I almost passed out. Can’t read it? It says that the gratuity is $77.48. The total check amount was $493.48.

This restaurant marks the very first time that I spent that amount of money on dinner, but still left hungry. My dinner consisted of about three slices of chicken and two tablespoons of lobster risotto. It was fabulous, but may have been more suited for a little leprechaun (who, by the way, happened to come along for the night out).

We then made our way down the boardwalk to a comedy club. Heels and boardwalks don’t really mesh well, so a couple of the girls and I negotiated a good rate on this "royal rolling cart." The first guy didn’t want to take four of us and was asking for a ridiculous rate, so we huffed off with attitude and were chased down by this lovely man Ali from Turkey who truly got a workout pushing the four of us down the boardwalk. I include the "before" picture of Ali because afterwards he was in need of some CPR, fluids, etc.

Since we didn’t arrive early enough at the comedy show, (and also probably because we were WAY younger than the median as far as the audience went), we were seated in stadium like seating with leprechauns in mind (Are you sensing a theme here?). We spent much of the comedy show wiggling around trying to figure out what to do with our legs. Luckily, my shorter friend switched seats with me so I could hang my legs out in the aisle.

When we weren’t wiggling, we were trying to figure out why we weren’t laughing very much. Tickets to the show were pretty expensive, and all three comedians disappointed. When the second comedian starts almost every joke with "I’m from Oklahoma" you know you’re in for a rough night. "RV," the only man in our crew, actually began to shout pleadingly for him to leave the stage, as in "You suck. Get off the stage." There’s a certain charm when you hear a man with a British accent saying those types of things, which probably explains why we didn’t get kicked out.

We should have all joined in the heckling; we certainly all felt the same. But we were hoping for something better with the headliner (I must also state here that although the comedians were a big disappointment, the complimentary popcorn was not).

When the Oklahoma man was finished with his dismal routine, the headliner came out. By this point, we were all feeling tired and not amused in the slightest. The comedian took one look at his audience, noticed all the white hair and proceeded to make almost his entire routine about viagra and cialis. I don’t know about you, but I get enough emails about that stuff. I certainly don’t want to hear about it in a room full of old men. It was just wrong.

We all needed some pumping up. Our choices were to either wait in line for a dance club and pay a $20 cover, or pay nothing and go hang out at the karaoke bar, Planet Rose. Karaoke it was. . .

While it’s fun to watch strangers singing, it’s more fun when it’s someone from your group of people who gets up there. I’m a good friend like that, so I put my name in and recruited my back-up singers and dancers. There was an hour wait, during which time my back-up girls and I warmed up our vocals on "Girls just want to have fun" and "Livin’ on a Prayer." We were ready, and then it was our turn.

I belted out Amy Winehouse’s "Rehab" the best I could (I could have also received a dental exam apparently). My back-up girls did a fabulous job singing the "No, No, No" chorus, and danced like there was no tomorrow.

I’m guessing it was at least a decent performance because I got several high 5’s on stage, and after the performance one very slurred "awesssoomee" from some guy who could hardly open his eyes.

Anyway, I think I have a new karaoke song. If you’re not familiar with the song, here you go:

Here’s another karaoke performance of "Man in the Mirror" by some of the girls in the crew, with some random guys who offered to help out.

I’ve never been out to a place that stays open past 1 or 2 a.m., but this place did and the next thing we knew, it was after 3 a.m.!

We got another crazy cab driver to take us back to the beach house. "RV," being the British gent that he is, grilled up some hot-dogs (I was sort of surprised he wasn’t serving up Lucky Charms) and we all eventually made our way to bed around 4:30 a.m.

We spent the morning eating bagels and rehashing the nights events. I got home yesterday around dinner time after hitting tons of beach traffic on the way home. I didn’t mind though. It gave me plenty of time to work on perfecting "Rehab" in a car with good acoustics.

When are we doing this again???