Tiger Woods I Ain't

I went to a bachelorette party yesterday afternoon. It consisted of the bride, her maid of honor, a friend and me going mini-golfing in Merrifield and then eating medium chili at a restaurant in Clarendon. I was home by 9:30, stone sober in that none of us had had a drop of alcohol, but drunk and slurring from fatigue.

The mini-golfing was fun, although my attempts to make polite conversation and birdie-putts were both way off. Someone has to be last on the scorecard, and so I shot a 64 on 18 easy holes, making everyone else look good. I wasn't trying to be charitable, I'm just not that good at sports involving a ball.

My companions were pleasant, we just weren't on the same wavelength conversationally. The last exchange over dinner was typical of our interaction. The friend of the bride had regaled us with some curious and several rather flat vignettes from her drunken past, from accidently ending up in a strip club in downtown St. Paul during Oktoberfest (yelling beerily at the matronly artiste to "Go home to your kids" while her friends were urged by the bouncer to remove her from the premises), to stumbling home in the wee hours from a cousin's neighboring farm in rural Minnesota and meeting her sanguine father coming out to do the morning's milking. She finished up by telling us about a Christmas when her mother had gotten drunk and started doing yoga.

I had grimaced cordially at the previous stories, but had no idea what to say to this one. Maternal inebriation is not exactly a usual polite company subject. "Did she get her foot behind her head?" I inquired lightly. Everyone stared at me in puzzlement. "What?" At that point, I decided I was too tired for further revelry and asked a friend (who had just showed up for a cameo, to wish the bride well before heading off to another party) to take me home, which she kindly did. Sometimes cordiality is a drain on the psyche, and nothing takes it out of me faster than an audience who doesn't laugh at my jokes.