Jesters and Pirates and Hillary, Oh My!

My worlds collided when the Clinton wedding was held in Rhinebeck, right down the road from Omega. Brando and I hopped in Adelaide to go partake in the festivities; I had my jester hat and guitar in the backseat, but they turned out to be unnecessary, since we found an estate sale along the way that provided us with even better outfits. We picked up three hats (two fur and one flowered), hatbox, records, and clothing for 5$, since we had so entertained the yard sale holders just by being our bickering and ridiculous selves.

Brandon donned a fur hat and I wore the floppy flowered one, and within twenty minutes we had also procured a cigar and were flouncing around the main street with it. We provided ample material for the crowds of photographers who were standing around in need of subjects, and we preened for a while before heading to a beer and cheese shop to decompress. It was about ten o'clock in the morning, and the men at the table next to us appeared to have been there a good couple hours already. Their table was littered with empty pint glasses and platters. They swore that they had just seen Bill Clinton drive by in a mini-van, with a bike rack on the top.

"Are you sure that wasn't the car that keeps going by with people dressed in Bill and Hillary masks?" I asked.

"Do you think that could have been Hillary towing that boat past just now?" Asked Brandon.

And the men just muttered something into their beers, and one of them went to get more cheese.

We noticed there were proverbs written on the walls, and so before leaving we offered the owners one of our own limericks which we thought would be perfectly suited to the environment, and goes like this:

There once was a half-drunken drink
Which gave me a pause to think
If I had my druthers,
I'd guzzle ten others,
But then I might puke in the sink.

The owners promised to put it on the walls within the week.

We gallavanted over to the health food store, where someone thought it would be a good idea to get a shot of wheat grass after all the beer and cheese and cigar-ing. And that's about the time I started feeling a little sick from all the merriment. We got more pictures taken, gallavanted into a Tibetan shop, enjoyed some more street side festivities, and finally began to make our way back home. But the fun wasn't over yet; the gas station was having Customer Appreciation Day, which consisted of a 20 cent discount on gas, free goldfish, and 25 cent hot dogs. By the time we returned to Omega, Valentina was starting to feel severely ill. Carlo, on the other hand, managed to down another entire plate of vegetarian fare before work. All of campus was duly intimidated by our innate class as demonstrated by the outlandish hats, and we both wore them on our respective work shifts well into nightfall.

And then it was time for SPIEGEL, which was great fun except for the fact that a wayward piece of mascara got lodged in my eye and made for a ridiculous eye-patch wearing situation the next day which I was uncharacteristically nonplussed about, considering my long-standing fixation with pirates.

To be continued!