one is silver, the other gold: part two

Thursday, jul. 24, 2008   |   0 comments

When last we spoke, I was telling you about my rambling, scrambling ten-or-so previous days, and I’d made it as far as last Monday. And so:

Tuesday: Party-favor stuffing at Maggie’s house!
Now this was a really fun day. First of all, I finally got to pat the in-the-flesh pattables of the beautiful and hilarious Alice of Finslippy and the perfectly toothed Melissa of Suburban Bliss (is it possible to have a crush on someone’s mouth?), which right there makes for a Dear-Diary-caliber day. But then you add on special toppings like Bryan mixing Glass Houses (and even going so far as to walk to the store to purchase more vodka, wow), endless Thai food, relaxed catch-up time with both Ally and Maggie, and—the cherry on top—Hank’s perfect cheeks, and suddenly you’ve got yourself a metaphorical sundae of epic greatness. On a Tuesday!

Pill popping in preparation for the Mighty Haus launch party.

Each gift box was ingeniously furnished with two doses of hangover relief.

Wednesday: So You Think You Can Dance…Dance…Dance
Yes, on Wednesday Marco and I stayed home and sat on our dog-haired couch, eating cereal for dinner and watching the best season of the best reality show on our gigantic black hole Death Star television. That’s right.

Thursday: Insecurity, perverts, and grilled cheese
Thursday got off to kind of a rocky start when I walked into the party for all the BloghHer speakers, wandered the circumference of the room, realized I knew no one, and was promptly blindsided by a wave of social anxiety the likes of which I’ve rarely (never? ever?) experienced. I tried to quash the discomfort with alcohol, a trusted friend which, when applied orally, typically brings on the happy, but it didn’t even dent my feelings of intense dorkwardness.

A nice woman (whose name I completely forget, such was my panic…I’m sorry nice woman!) came up and chatted with me and my social anxiety for awhile, but I still keenly felt the sting of my inability to gel with the partygoers as a whole. Finally I noticed someone whom I sort of recognized, so I took a big sip of booze and lurched at her with a, “Don’t I know you? Don’t you have…twins? I think?” Of course she turned out to be Stephanie of Greek Tragedy, who is hugely famous in an online web diary sort of way? Or something? Enough so that she was actually lined up for the closing night Keynote about “Living the Truman Show”? I know nothing.

At that point, my first nice woman friend left the party, and Stephanie and I were left to chat about the recent release of her third book (!), and how maybe it was going to be made into a movie (!), and how the actual Amy Sedaris had actually just called to chat about actually being in said movie (!). And I…told her how I like to take photos of my outfits.

I had these outfit cards Moo-ed out for the conference, pretty much the best $20 I’ve ever spent.

Throughout our conversation, Stephanie super-nicely smiled and nodded and asked interesting questions, all of which I, in my self-cringing state, interpreted as just polite tolerance. But I’ve since read that she felt equally outsidered at some of the BlogHer events, which has prompted some real “isn’t life funny, etc.” thinking over here in my head. Huh!

Stephanie also later revealed (in her Keynote talk on Saturday night) that she’s not really a big laugher in person. And really, nothing throws Nutty Confessor me more than a non-laugher. I always think the reason the person isn’t laughing at my self-defecating and neurotic comments is that they don’t realize I’m (kind of) kidding and they’re trying to spare my feelings, and so I EXAGGERATE even more in an effort to make it clear that I don’t really, truly believe what I’m saying. And then, when I STILL don’t get the chuckle-release I’m waiting for, I just start talking faster and waving my arms around and opening my eyes wide and sweating and tap-dancing. Poor Stephanie!

(She actually bought one of my books later in the conference and then voluntarily came up and asked me to sign it, so at least she doesn’t seem to be actively pursuing a restraining order in my direction, which I consider a small yay.)

Anyway, anyway, anyway. Once my word storm on Stephanie finally ran dry, me and my feelings of self-craziness scampered off to grab my coat and remove myself from Dodge before I could take another hostage. But as I was walking out the door I found myself pulled into the attractor-beam that is the supermodel eyeballs of Kelly from Mocha Momma, whom I fell in love with instantly. And then I met Kelly’s wildly together daughter, Mallory (oh to have been that wise and poised at her age…or even at my age), and before I knew it, another hour had passed and all my social weirdness had totally evaporated. (Wow, just look at all this typing. Is anybody still reading this?)

Liz and our Awesome New Friend Lisa, sipping drinks on Gawker’s dime.

By then I was late for my next engagement, and so quickquick I lurched over to the Otis bar on Maiden Lane to join Liz for a Gawker-financed drink to celebrate her triumphant appearance on a panel at the PSFK conference. Due to the phenomenon of free drinks, the place was packed well beyond my capacity as a 38-old, so I hovered in the corner with our Awesome New Friend Lisa and drank whatever drinks that this weirdo guy, an asshole-obsessed asshole who was trying very hard to get with Liz, brought to us. The man was not the greatest, but the drinks he procured sure were. And they totally worked! After about an hour I was too liquored up to weather the cramped, crowded cement hole that is Otis, so Liz and I snuck ourselves away from the Ass Man and she walked me back to the BlogHer hotel, where…

…I was immediately overwhelmed with a whole parade of Ladies on My List of Want-to-Meets, including (but not limited to): Sarah of Que Sera Sera, Eden of Fussy, Whitney of Ugly Green Chair, Antonia of Whoopee, Leah of LeahPeah…just like that. Bam, bam, bam! Rat, tat, tat! After a flurry of hugs and business cards (so many business cards), we all decided that we were in dire need of food, and so we turned to the place that so many San Franciscans turn to when it’s after ten and that grilled-cheese sort of hunger strikes: Sparky’s.

Eden, Maggie, and Sarah say “blog.”

Friday: In which I stand up in front of hundreds of people and say “Wow”
So on Friday I cut out of work early and hustled over to the St. Francis ballroom, home to the BlogHer opening Community Keynote in which I was scheduled to read a short entry I wrote for this very website. After many, many talented women and even a smattering of men had their turn at the mic (I laughed, I cried!), it was time for shaky and profoundly sober me to get on up there. I went directly after the mythical Jenny of The Bloggess, who had been back stage sipping from airplane bottles of Disaronno. Jenny loose-cannoned out onto stage and, clutching the curtain for balance, announced that she was wearing her “confidence wig” because of her “anxiety disorder” and then she warned us that she was going to be saying “cunt” a lot, and then she said something about her “riot gun” (I think?) and threw her hands up in the air and yelled “NRA!” And I, from my warm-up spot just off stage, started to get very worried that she was going to go completely off the rails of her crazy train. But! Somehow, someway she managed to bring it all home and proceeded to tell the all-time funniest story about oral surgery that I’ve ever had the pleasure of. Truth! She brought the house down and was pretty much the funniest read of the night. And so, it was into that vacuum that I tiptoed out into the spotlight and, looking offstage at Jenny’s teetering retreat, summed up my shellshock with a small, whispered “Wow.”

After the reading, we went over to Ruby Skye for chicken pot pies and raw-chicken pasta. And then, lickety splickety, the great Sarah and I cabbed over to the Mighty Haus party, the big kick-off housewarming for the spanking-new Might Haus site, brought to you by the mighty Maggie and the bliss-making Melissa. And it was a truly epic party. It was. I learned how to sip wine out of a cracked cup (tip: drink fast). I “Push[ed] It” all over the dance floor. My new favorite Zan of A Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny may or may not have cupped my ass. Marco talked jacket fashion and practiced fancy handshakes with Zan’s Jonathan. Heather of Dooce and I exchanged shouts of “So nice to finally meet you!” The beautiful Holly of Nothing But Bonfires and I talked The Knowledge. And…and…AND I got to take home my own antique key necklace and aspirin and a DOUGHNUT!

Me, wearing my key to the Haus party.

And here, as I stumble home from the best party of 2008 with sore feet and high-heels in hand, I will leave you to give my story-fingers another break. Tune in tomorrow-ish for Part Three of the tale, in which a microphone is attached to my clothing.

a breathless story about a small series of events

Thursday, feb. 22, 2007   |   0 comments

A couple weekends back I got a great deal on Southwest and flew down to LA for my friend Megan’s housewarming party (her loft is insanely gorgeous, with brick walls and tons of light and space, wow). The trip perfectly coincided with an art opening for one of my favorite web people, Lisa Congdon, which was held at the Reform School, a store I’ve long wanted to poke into.

So even though it was the scheduling was a tad hectic — Megan’s party started right at eight and the opening started at seven, giving me only the briefest window in which to navigate to the Reform School (in Megan’s ridiculously sporty convertible Audi thing), ogle everything, and then dash back to Megan’s — I scrambled my way over there, managing to get turned around only once or maybe four times along the way.

Now, as a small subplot to all this, I’d tried to get Pam to hit the opening with me, but she couldn’t go because she had to go buy a ball gown for this black-tie event (she wound up coming to Megan’s party instead, which was such a delightful clash of my worlds, delightful and booze-soaked). By the way, that’s my new favorite excuse for bowing out of any invite: Unfortunately I shall not be able to accept your kind invitation as I’ll be otherwise ensconced in a ball gown shopping spree. Anyway, so as I was heading off to the opening, my Sidekick rattled with a text from “AB”: “Are you going to Lisa Congdon’s show tonight? YOU MUST CALL ME!” AB. AB? Who do I know by the initials AB who also knows I’m headed to this opening? Huh. So I called the number, and the one and only Anna Beth answers; she’s busy making cupcakes in Louisiana, and thus can’t make Lisa Congdon’s opening, but would I be so kind as to buy one of Lisa’s pieces for her? You know, which ever one looks the nicest? (A little more background: She’d asked Pam to go on her behalf, and Pam, amused by the strange coincidence of two of her out-of-town friends trying to get her to go to this thing, gave her my number, much to AB’s confusion, seeing as I’m supposed to be in Oakland, etc.)

Cut to me, at the crowded, crowded opening, on the phone with the hilarious AB, whispering descriptions — I was painfully aware of being the frantic Los Angeles asshole on the cellphone — of all the different pieces as AB tried to match each one to the small photos on Lisa’s site. “There’s the painted ‘Regret’ platter thing,” I hissed, “and a small wood block wrapped with butcher’s twine? With like…antique sort of photos of I think Asian people on it?” All the while, the list of available items was dwindling as more and more “sold” stickers got stuck next to item after item. “Oh my god! AB, people are buying everything! Fast! Faster! PICK ONE!” And then in the middle of all that, Megan beeped through, in a panic over needing a bottle of cooking oil (for her mind-meltingly great parmesan beignets, holy shit). So quick, quick I bought a piece for AB (one of the gorgeous little collage blocks), and whoops, I also got myself a little something (see below), and then I scrambled over to pay my (deep, so deep) respects to Lisa, whom I’ve never met before. But Lisa was already talking to another one of her fans, so I hovered off to the side as unobtrusively as I could manage, but then yet another fan swooped into the respectful two-second cushion I’d left open. So finally I just dove in, and what witty opener did I wow her with? “I HAVE TO GO BUY COOKING OIL!” And then I followed up that insane greeting with a bunch of bumbling half-gushes — “such a big fan” and “everything…so lovely” and “the walls…pretty!” — all while pumping her hand feverishly.

And then, sweaty and mortified, I raced off and bought cooking oil at the weirdest 99-cent store ever.

Here’s the shedding tree I was lucky enough to grab for myself (image pinched from Lisa’s own Flickr set from the show — I won’t actually get it in my hot little hands until after the show breaks sometime in March).

madonna and friends

Sunday, nov. 26, 2006   |   0 comments

Friday was Brian Mello‘s fortieth birthday, and to celebrate this huge day, we all surprised him with a mass gathering at the insane Madonna Inn. His beautiful and highly motivated wife, Sandra, started organizing all his friends and family three whole months ago, and we’ve all been sitting on our secret reservations for months and months now. Marco and I stayed at the red, red Nautical Way room:

After we creeped around, trying to avoid Brian and Sanra spotting us (which led to a ridiculous, sneaky jog through some weird construction site behind the hotel, which Marco described as like an “episode of the Monkees“), we all gathered at the bar and yelled “yay!” when he and Sandra finally walked in. And then we wagon-trained into town for a decadant cram-fest of pizza, pizza, and more pizza (including a gorgeous “dessert pizza,” a drizzled, apple thing). And then we came back to Peter and Laura’s Tack Room, which was somehow even redder and pornier than our own Nautical Way, and we drank and drank.

Note my shoes! The gorgeous, perfect, perfectly tall, and comfortable Park shoes from Jeffrey Campbell, a birthday present from Marco that has made me so happy:

They’re almost identical to the Marc Jacob’s mary janes, except only cuter (the shape of the toe, plus the color selection, is much better on the Park) and $200 cheaper.

I wound up turning in at a shocking, pathetic 10 o’clock, but the photo session spiraled deep into the night.

The next morning, I woke up bright-eyed and bushy after ten hours of solid coma sleep, and Marco and I joined all the other hungovereds for breakfast in the Madonna Inn café (they have pink sugar in their sugar mills!). And then I climbed some rocks.

(All photos by Marco, you bet.)

chocktails!

Friday, jul. 15, 2005   |   0 comments

I celebrated my birthday this year with a chocktail party, and evening full of cocktails, champagne and champagne-inspired fizzibles, and also chocolate.

The “lay down some brown” spread included a dark, deep-kneebend of a chocolate torte by Jill, two Tartine torte-lets brought by Adrienne, MarieBelle Aztec hot chocolate sent by Megan all the way from NYC, Kozy Shack Real Chocolate pudding, and mini chocolate-on-chocolate cupcakes from Citizen Cupcake.

There was a jetted-directly-from-Italy hazelnut-chocolate dipping sauce from Peter and Laura. There were insanely decadent hazelnut/caramel/milk-chocolate/dark-cocoa Love Nuts from Maggie and Bryan. There were Scharffen Berger covered dried champagne grapes from Marco. Oh! And chocolate-covered cherries and blueberries from Adrienne. And chocolate-dipped strawberries and TINFOIL CHOCOLATE KISS HAT with “HERSHEY BIRTHDAY” paper pull (see photos below) from Doug and Winnie. And chocolate-almond lip balm, a gift from me to me!

Of course there were brownies, from both Recchiuti (gloriously toothsome) and, once again, Jill (Jill’s was a chocolate-dusted miracle menorah oil of a brownie, slivers of which managed to last and please well into Marco’s birthday “barbecute” the next day, and even to Jeff’s chicken-coop and birthday celebration the following week). There was also a bottle of Demeter Brownie Cologne on hand, a long-distant Christmas gift from same NY Megan, so people could spray their bodies to make their very skin whiff of brownie, seriously.

And! I made a cake! A cake from my childhood known as the Picnic Cake, a 9”x12” sheet cake chocolated specifically with low-brow Baker’s chocolate and frosted with an amazing caramel frosting. I used my BRAND NEW KITCHENAIDE MIXER (a collective and entirely humbling birthday gift from all my friends), and it was glorious. So, so, so much easier than the hand-held mixer route, my god. I was a touch nervous because I forewent the traditional single rectangle for two nine-inch rounds, a shift I worried I might screw up through over-baking or over-stretching the amount of batter. But I set the timer early by fifteen whole minutes and the toothpick came out clean and yay! There wasn’t enough frosting to go around, but I winged it sandwich-style, and it still tasted exactly as I remembered…better maybe because I think I prefer the slightly cake-heavier ratio of frosting-to-cake! I topped things off with a chocolate Sharffen Berger monkey, which I affixed with an obscene dollop of remainder frosting, which looked very cute but made slicing somewhat difficult. And then I made a yellow cake with chocolate frosting for Marco’s birthday the very next day! Cake, cake a wonderful fruit!

There was also a singing gorilla with balloons and tutu, who made me sit on his lap and eat a banana.

Thank you, Dave and Vendela! Who else could engineer a gorilla-gram remotely from Turkey? Of course it helps to have a Jill-proxy on hand.

Anyway, I am now 35 (thirty-jive? thirty-dive?) years old. My house is still unreasonably full of chocolate. Life is good!

PS: Despite Jill’s generous attribution of “drunk dialing“ as an Evany-ism, I can not take credit for it. (Who coined that? I don’t know. Just another one of those things magically absorbed from the pop-culture ether, a la “cewebrity”?) But yes. Turning “frownie into brownie“ was all me. I am also responsible for “drunk-turning frownie into brownie.”

beginnings and endings, and drinks

Wednesday, feb. 18, 2004   |   0 comments

Jonathan told me recently the best way to foil telemarketers is to just not say anything when they call. If you “hello, hello?” before you hang up, it registers as an active number. But if you sit there, silently, and wait until they hang up, your number gets marked as dead.

When my phone rang at 7:28 this morning, I was deep into one of those womb-like sleeps, hot and wrinkled and sweaty and disoriented and blinking like a hairless baby rat. A ratisimo. Rateensy. I managed to pick up the phone fourth ring and … shhh! I sat there, quietly breathing through my nose, until the person hung up. Five seconds later the phone rang again, and I picked it up, but still … shhhh! The third time, though, the person stayed on for a really long time, so finally I broke down and said it.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello?” I said.

“Evany?” she said.

“Hello?” I said.

“It’s Liz!”

“Oh! I was doing the Jonathan thing, the not saying anything so the telemarketers think you’re dead.”

“Oh my god you’re crazy.”

“I am crazy.”

“OK. So, we had a baby last night!”

“WHAT? OH MY GOD!”

“A girl. A pretty baby girl. Eight pounds, four ounces of baby girl.”

“Name?”

“We haven’t decided yet. I think we’re going to take a nap first.”

So there you have it. Congratulations Liz, Ben, and big (but still so little) sister Mae on the bouncing new addition to the family. They also got themselves a sooth-sayer, maybe. Liz’s water never broke this time around and the baby was born with a caul, which is supposed to mean (I’m pretty sure I didn’t make this up) that she has “the sight” and maybe even “the power to heal.” Bonus!

– - – - – - – -

lay off-and-on

Thanks for all your kind email about the whole “losing my job” thing. I’m sorry if I haven’t answered your email, or if, god, I’ve answered it TWICE — I’ve been sending out email from three different places these days, and I’ve lost all track of what I’ve said to whom. Anyway. Hi! You’re the greatest … have you been working out? Because it just wouldn’t be fair for you to look so fine without having to put a little sweat into it.

In summary, though: things have been very weird here, in my head, since the big layoff last week. For one, I’m not actually done with work yet. They’re keeping me here until March 5 to “transition the product.” While it’s nice to have been given time to pack things up and finish some projects (because really the whole thing came as a complete surprise and I hadn’t done any of the usual packing and backing up), working in this grey, undead mode has been very odd, and it’s going to last for another two weeks yet.

And then there’s the whole WHAT NEXT!? panic thing, which is already my default approach to life only now it’s been ramped up by a factor of at least ten. But I’ve been trying not to let myself worry about it too much, at least not for a month or so. I’ve never been on employment before, and I’d like to rock that just a bit — buy some stained sweat pants, get a prescription for a daily delivery of fat-stuffed crust pizza, watch the living heehaw out of some cable.

When the worrying starts, as it does, usually at 4:20 in the morning, which is when the meowing starts, I remind myself that it was high, high time for a change. (This April would have been my six year anniversary at Webmonkey, and that’s a lot of years, a half dozen!) Change is good! Change is sexy. Change, I french you.

You know what else helps stem the worrying? DRINKING!

– - – - – - – -

treating VD

I cured this year’s case of VD by administering a whole lot of drinks orally. A pod of people come over for boozing and cake-hole-stuffing, and I even moved my bed into the closet so we’d have plenty of room to get running starts at all the alcohol.

My friends are so pretty. And colorful! Like really, the night was an almost freakish riot of oranges and pinks and reds and greens and blues. And flowers! I got flowers.

You know the night is off to a fine start when Liz and Ivan ARRIVE carrying full glasses of champagne.

We played trust exercises all night. Here Matt and Jill play “mirror”.

If I’d sniffed my layoff in the winds, I may not have purchased these very tall and expensive Fluevog boots, but … won’t they be perfect for “the interview”?

A suspiciously cuddly Marbles kept Colleen stapled to the couch for like an hour. (Notice the theme-y pink feather notion strapped to Marbles head. MARBLES LOVES VD!)

Shree glammed up my shitty Ikea cat-scratch chair.

At some point I actually unhinged my jaw to allow more treats and libations to cram their way in. Will and Jill and that fine kitty top helped!

FLOWERS! I got flowers.

more words on: partytime!

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