Club Nights

My mom is a small fairy godmother of a woman who carries a mad rumpus with her wherever she goes. She's a wee sprite with a penchant for laughter who was my first exposure to quirkiness, and the most enduring.

Every month Mom would meet with seven other ladies from the neighborhood to play pinochle, eat delicious dips and munchies (made by the indentured hands of her children), and talk about what joys and disappointments their families were. Each club member would take a turn as hostess, and the party rotated from house to house so that we would host this hilariously bawdy bunch of women every eight months. It was the one night we were allowed to eat all the hors d'oeuvres we could keep down, and to stay up late for my mom's special raspberry dessert.

During Club, my brothers and I would be banished to our rooms to do homework, or to my parents' room to watch some spirit-breakingly boring special on PBS with our dad while the ladies whooped it up with their coffee cups full at 9:00pm and Virginia Slims blazing in the living room. I was mainly resentful not because I wanted to be in the living room to participate in the card games and big girl conversations, but because that's where they kept the dip and appetizers for a main course that would never come. I was often in charge of hunting and gathering "dinner" for the bedroom dwellers because I was the smallest and had the best chance of going unnoticed. In order to get to the food, I would have to make it past the perfume and 80s beehive gauntlet. And the hugs. Oh Lord, the hugs. It seems that every single one of them had huge chests and an endless supply of polyester blouses. Let me tell you, polyester lives to soak up White Shoulders and Charlie.

Most of the ladies were the coolest folks you could ever hope to meet with kind and generous hearts tucked in their gravity-defying bosoms, but there were a couple doozies that made Florence Jean Castleberry look like the lost courtier of Queen Victoria. They would talk about their latest hot dates with the local Cleetuses to the dismay of all in earshot. No detail was left to the imagination, and inevitably they would reach the pinnacle of their sordid tales of woe while I was scooping up a plate of olive dip for the PBS crowd.

Today, I still make a meal of appetizers when given the opportunity and have committed those dip recipes to memory, much to the delight of my coworkers and party going peeps. Though I never learned how to play pinochle, I surely did learn how to laugh. I think of those days often and wonder what my own kids might learn from my candid conversations with my girlfriends and my openness to quirky lifestyles and bold personalities that I inherited gratefully from my mom. I hope for their sake they're able to grin as widely as I do when I think of my own mother, her club, and the cries of "Hokey Shit!" at one o'clock in the morning on a school night. And if not, well, I hope they learn to like the riveting drones of PBS on a Wednesday evening.