Where I Was From

On Masquerades

Leah: 1
Coffee: 0

I'm drinking my coffee out of a big wooden stein with a base about as wide and heavy as a horseshoe. You know what that means? I've been awake for a whole hour and I haven't destroyed any electronics by spilling into them.

Take THAT, Apple Computer!



Our New Year's Eve masquerade bash has been in the works for a while now and though serendipity arranged for my grandma to give me an amazing vintage dress for Christmas, I can't find a mask I can tolerate anywhere. Mask shopping online ought to be a cinch since Mardi Gras/carnavale aren't all that far off, but if I put on a mask with eye-holes that aren't enormous, I Freak Out. I am, after all, already myopic as all hell. I do not like to augment this handicap. You know how cats get when you put them in a bathtub? Putting a mask on my face is like strapping a little doll-sized bathtub to a cat's head. It don't jive.

Diagnosis: I might have to resort to facepaint.




The one perk of having zero readers: you can reference My Chemical Romance at will. It's just you and me today, Internet.

I do have an old glitzy mask sitting around on my desk, and it would be perfectly fine for the party except for two reasons: the eye-holes are tiny, and it brings back weird memories. I got it for cheap in the French Quarter to wear to a Purim ball back when I was living down in the swamp and all. I liked that it was relatively simple: silver with gold sequins all over it, versus the huge feathered ones in yellow, green, and purple. I was temporarily estranged from my erstwhile boyfriend, so I asked Ryan, the guy-friend most likely to own a suit, to go as my date. He was an heir of some kind, from Texas. The director of the university Honors Program liked to make fun of him because he'd worn $3,000 shoes made out of some kind of reptile to class one day. I'm not clear on how shoes can cost that much unless they're programmed to make you dance like Fred Astaire, but I digress. Ryan had good manners. We went to a ball. Everybody danced in a circle to "Hava Nagila." Ryan walked me home and seemed weirded out when I hugged him goodnight. I figured that people of his stature must bow to each other or exchange cigars, instead.

But I didn't know him all that well. Everyone in our class knew that he had a pretty intense crush on a tiny girl named Mirya who spent the bulk of her time sunbathing drunk. A few weeks after the ball, I got back with my boyfriend, and Mirya woke up in her dorm room late one night to see Ryan sitting next to her bed, watching her sleep. I heard she got very fat the next year. And he was married with kids, or rather, married because of the kids, by the time he graduated. I never heard who the wife was, but he didn't seem particularly fond of her. I couldn't say for sure - I didn't know him all that well.

Purim sure was fun, though.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 11:35 AM