Last night I left my 2-year-old with my long-suffering husband and went out to dinner with a bunch of ladies from my town. We are all members of the city's Arts Council, a committee which plans all the city's various cultural events, of which there are an astounding number when you take into consideration that our town only has a population of about 23 people. Our town is so small and isolated that we had to drive 2 cities away to go to a real restaurant.
I feel like I have to give a little bit more explanation about the Arts Council. There is a 3 year term to serve on the arts council and a new president is elected every year. The reason that presidents only serve for 1 year is that most of them have collapsed from a combination of exhaustion and major panic attacks by the time 12 months is over. The way that people become committee members is that the president of the committee calls every single woman within city limits who is over 18 and who does not have dementia, and begs them to be a member on the Arts Council. 95% of them either avoid the phone call or tell the president that they'll have to talk to their husbands and call back. In my part of the world, when you ask someone to do something and their response is, "I'll talk to my husband and get back to you," it's code for NO. You can be 100% sure that they will never call back. This is a physical law of the universe which can never be broken. Nobody ever accepts anything after having said those fatal words. Ever, ever, ever.
So basically the Arts council is made of the remaining 5% who had no idea what the Arts Council was when we accepted and didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. Now we find ourselves meeting every month to have collective nervous breakdowns as we plan and carry out various city events, which include dances, dinners, fairs, concerts, and making sure that nobody tapes or tacks anything to any city-owned wall, for any reason, ever. I'm not sure how this became the responsibility of the Arts Council. I suppose someone had to do it because it has become the major problem facing the city right now. Several people have based their political campaigns off this issue. The big problem is that whenever anything is attached to the walls in our town, all the paint on that wall immediately commences to crack, peel, and fall off. This necessitates a new paint job which is a whole other process by itself, so it's easier just to not let anyone tape anything on the walls. We all take turns doing overnight guard duty in the city ballroom where this type of travesty is most likely to happen.
I am getting distracted from my main point, which is the annual dinner that we all treat ourselves to, as reward for enduring another year on the Arts Council. This dinner was at Texas Roadhouse, otherwise known as The World's Loudest Restaurant. It is also the restaurant with probably the best food for about 100 miles. I called for Call Ahead Seating before we got there. Texas Roadhouse makes sure that you know when you call that you are NOT making a reservation. I'm still not sure what they have against reservations. When everyone arrived (our committee consists of 9 women and one man), I waded through the peanut shells to the 3 hostesses at the hostess stand to tell them that we were ready to be seated, where they discovered that we had one extra person in our party that TR was not expecting. The 3 hostesses, two of which had formerly been focused on a handsome young man who came inquiring about job openings, started panicking and the young man was summarily tossed out the door as it required the brain power of all 3 hostesses and another 10 minute wait to figure out how to add 1 extra chair to our table. I wondered if the hostesses might go into a coma from the effort of extra brain function that it took to add that one chair, but ultimately it appears they will survive to hostess another day.
I ordered salad, because I figured that is what ladies get when they go out to eat together. I later found this to be the biggest mistake of my life. I'd never had the TR salad, but the description involved the word "bacon," so I figured I couldn't go wrong, but when it arrived, I discovered it consisted of California's entire bumper crop of lettuce, exactly 4 shreds of cheddar cheese, 2 chicken nuggets, and 5 pea-sized bits of bacon. It was a good thing I had already impregnated myself with a large Texas Roadhouse baby consisting of Rattlesnake bites, Bloomin' Onion, dinner rolls, and lemon water. I ate about 3 bites of the salad and stuffed the rest into a to-go box. I have yet to determine what to do with the remaining lettuce. I will need to devise some sort of strategy to deal with all the salad that will be going rotten in my fridge this week. Somehow I will need to fit both our normal household trash and 75% of the iceberg lettuce in the entire state of Utah into my 100-gallon trash can. I have faith that it can be done.
As a reward for all of our service on the Arts Council, every member was given a generous gift certificate to Theurer's Custom Meats, our only local business. I told my husband that I plan to spend it all on bacon but he may eventually convince me to use some of it to buy some beef steak also. I don't know. Time will tell. Regular bacon at the grocery store is prohibitively expensive and not that good, but Theurer's bacon has that magical combination of being both affordable and delicious.
And now, although at this point you are begging for more of my stories, I must leave you because my son has left me a lovely gift in his diaper and I need to go take care of it.
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