Every once in a while, you just feel like ordering out from Olive Garden. Every once in a while was tonight - the temptation of capellini pomodoros and not so great breadsticks was just too much to ignore. So, we tapped the Yelp app, dialed the number, placed the order and were told to come and fetch the lukewarm dishes in 15-to-20 minutes. When I arrived at the agreed upon time, they told me that there was no record of our order, but they would get it together for me in five minutes. All of this, extremely suspicious, but I went along with it. So, there I was, standing in this fancy restaurant, waiting around for the mistake to be corrected, near a bar with one lonely patron, drinking a glass of the cheapest of wines, waiting for his solitary dinner. While standing there, a woman is overheard talking to one of the employees about having seen someone out at the club, mentioning how she knows that the woman she's telling this story to knows that she doesn't go out to the club all that often, thereby making the story two or three times more dramatic than it would be under any other ordinary circumstances.
The story doesn't go anywhere, but the woman made a couple club noises (imagine for yourself the penetrating backbeats and those were the sounds) there in the lobby of that fancy restaurant and it reminded us just how unglamorous all of this was. This restaurant wasn't fancy. The meal was going to leave us unfulfilled. The breadsticks were harder than they normally are. The conversation we didn't mean to overhear, but couldn't help, was weak. The club she was referring to had to have been a dud and the person she saw there should have just gone unseen. It all just about made me want to knock every wine bottle I saw being used as authentic Italian decoration to the ground. Oh, the tedium of it all.
But, I stopped myself short, knowing that there was a contrast to this scene and that is the one of Black Light Dinner Party, where the good silvers gleam and every little detail is taken care of. The floor is ready for the soles of expensive shoes to stomp and slide all over it. This is the club that cannot just be gotten into. It's exclusive and it feels like it. It reminds me of that feeling of flipping through the pages of GQ, smelling all of the great colognes and knowing that - despite liking them immensely - if I were to look at the price tag on any of the bottles of the stuff, I'd pass out and never buy one. They're great to sniff and rub on our wrists though. This is the club that we'll get into someday, when we've graduated beyond eating at Olive Gardens, if that day should ever come.
These are the clubs that we'll head out to, order whatever drink the waitress recommends and keep buying them for everyone around if they're good - not caring what the tab's going to come to at the end of the night. In between there, we'll talk about getting older, growing older, going gray, thinking about the trees and people from the old neighborhoods that aren't there any longer. We'll have earned the distinction of getting to where we are now. We'll love this blue cool that we've achieved. It's just about getting there now. We think it's what we want, after a night like tonight.