on the path…More Games people play

Dinner was chicken or tofu with vegetables and rice. Excellent food! I was quite impressed. Oh and the salad! Tim brought stuff to make a delicious Asian salad. My job was to put spring mix in the bowls. For this job I was dubbed, “The Fluffer”. You know how salad gets wilted & smushed in the containers? The salad fluffer makes sure there’s no wilted pieces in the bowls and that it looks un-flat. All about the presentation right. Oh how I wished the joke about the “salad fluffer” had remained in the kitchen but I guess I’ll get5 use to it since I’m telling everyone about it now.

Our hostess poured the last bit of a marvelous Rodney Strong Pinot Noir. She commented as she poured how the Trader Joe’s clerk carded her. We laughed at the prospect of someone under 21 would care to know the difference between ‘Frass Canyon’ and ‘Rodney Strong’ Pinot Noir. But I understand that anyone our age would dig to be carded. Subtract a few years off.

The i-pod plays our generation’s soundtrack tune after tune. “silent all these years” by Tori Amos comes on and one of the guests says she had been listening to Tori Amos since 1988 during a bad break up with a boyfriend.

Politely, I disagreed and said that the album came out in 1992.
She, politely disagreed and insisted late 80’s.

Tim was looking at me from the other end of the table and saying “Be careful, Stevo is really good at this game.”

The guest sitting next to me smiled and said, do you want to wager? So I say , “well, how about a dollar?” and everyone insists on a larger wager. So during surge of self confidence I say, “okay, how about a bottle of Rodney Strong Pinot Noir?”

We shake hands and a laptop is retrieved to communicate with itunes regarding the release date.

No one ever asked if I worked at a record store from November 1991 through most of 1993.

I was off by one year. It came out in fall 1991. But I was closer than 1988.

We decided to have another dinner party sometime in the future where we’ll all share the bottle of Rodney Strong Pinot Noir.

All games were played in good fun; but I felt bad for my new friend, because this meant her memory of recovering from her late 80’s boyfriend is all wrong. I just let it go and said something about how I wish my brain would remember math procedures like it remembers albums and dates. Most of the time anyway.

Thanks for checking in.

Stephen A. Thomas

One Response to “on the path…More Games people play”

  1. Jeff Says:

    I thought the myth was that Tori Amos is timeless and all her albums sort of exist in the ether as marvelous bursts of divine creative energy. Or something like that. I always hated those girls.

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