Blame it on the Blue Moon

I have a terrible headache.

Most likely the result of drinking too may Blue Moons on an empty stomach last night. Nine years of (legal) consumption and you’d think I would have figured that one out. I did the same thing at this year’s Helen Hayes awards (prom for the theater crowd here in DC) but that I blame on the fact that their event planners decided that serving hot dogs and burgers at a formal event would be a nifty idea.

Nifty indeed.

When I get this kind of tipsy - I don’t do anything crazy-stupid, but I do engage in intense conversations with people that I don’t really know well enough to be having those conversations with. At HH I ended up babbling on about my family, politics and religion to an arts denizen with a lot of money and even more connections. She is a friend of a friend, and it occurred to me the next day that I should maybe do some damage control. I apologized to the friend, and he told me she’d thought I was “charming”.

Charming? You wanna see charming?

Last night I went down that path with a colleague I am working with for the first time. We started talking about the different social circles in this town, and how people may exist in one but migrate through others. The gathering I was doing the drinking (and not eating) at was not thrown by people not in my most immediate social circle, and attending this kind of thing still stirs up completely high school generated insecurities of “Will I have anyone to talk to at this party? Will I look stupid? Will there be people who don’t like me there?”

I did okay, last night, I think.

So the conversation wound around to how you can sort of know people here – by word of mouth or mutual acquaintances – without really knowing them. And then how it’s weird to actually meet them for the first time, even though you kind of felt like you knew them already.

And my conversation mate says: “Yeah – like it was cool to finally get to know you myself and see whether some of the things I’d heard over the years were actually true or not”.

Umm, okay. Thanks.

And yeah – that thing about the third nipple? Totally not true.