I don’t even have a title for this one.

I left to attend my cousins wedding last Thursday morning, and after several misadventures involving late and rescheduled planes, I arrived in Edmonton late Thursday night.

Edmonton is very new and shiny, and appears to be prospering again what with the recent, inexplicable increase in oil prices.

 

( Hey…why don’t we go and invade the country that holds the most oil! Then it’ll be cheaper, eh?)

 

It seems it’s worthwhile taking fuel from the ground in Alberta again, after a 20 year hiatus….after the oil boom in the early 80’s, the price of imported fuel was so low it was not cost effective to harvest this natural resource. Alberta went bust, and jobs and housing rates dropped. Things are on the upswing again, with the Iraqi war criminals ( Haliburton and others)  doing their price fixing on the oil, and there’s runaway profits to be made in these fuel producing parts of the world. I  wonder what’s happening in Texas these days……

Anyway, I ran around town the first day, trying to find an outfit suitable for the wedding, and became discouraged. Part of this problem is my own fault, because I have allowed my ass to get fatter in the last 3 years, and am now a size 14 ( Hi, I’m Minerva, and I have gained 50 pounds in 3 years….135# to 185#. I think I’m depressed). The problem with being this heavy is that you can’t find anything nice or stylish to wear. Your choices are these:

1. Clothes with baby ducks or Disney characters on them…I think of this as the ‘ I know I’m too fat to be sexy, so I’ll go for cute so you won’t mock me and stone me in the town square’ style. I hate that style.

2. Endangered animal wear……tiger prints and leopard skin in weird polyester fabrics. This is for fat chicks with attitude…”Yeah, I ate the tigers into extinction, and now I wear their skin. Don’t piss me off….”

3. Muumuus….or moo moos. And as ‘flattering’ as these sound, you get the feeling that, should the apocolypse come during the event, your seared carcass could feed a starving family of 6 through the nuclear winter.

I was able to fashion an ensemble that met my need for non-cute/scary/fat-lady-of-the-side-show elegance….a 2 button black jacket over a black silk camisole, a skirt that stopped just above the calf…black, with a large floral tiger lily print and gold thread embroidery in the center of the flowers…fitted through the hips, flaring just above the knee. High heeled strappy black sandals. I’m not good at describing this outfit, but I do favour a certain feminine elegance that is next to impossible to find in this super-sized version of myself….I like Katherine Hepburn crossed with Audrey Hepburn, if that makes any sense. It was alot easier to achieve when I was size 3, 5, 7, and 9. Now I’m in the double digits, I’m flat screwed….

which brings me to my next story.

Early Saturday morning, after my  first day in Edmonton, at 4 o’clock in the freaking morning, I hear a tapping and scratching at my hotel door.

The hotel is a nice one…concierges, and room service, and security and everything. The hairdresser who gives me a trim in the a.m. asks me what’s it’s like to ‘stay in a 5 star’ kind of hotel….paid for by my mother, who I am escorting to this family wedding. I tell her….

At 4 a.m., I awakened when the door scratcher tried to get my attention. I stumbled to the door, and flipped the security latch over before opening the door. The next thing I knew, some girl was thrusting her face into the space between the door and the jamb saying ‘LET ME IN!’. She kind of reminded me of Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’, so I exclaimed “WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?!?” and recoiled.

I scared her, so she backed away from the door, and then I was able to see a young naked woman with her hands folded across her breasts. I opened the door, and she spun around and flattened herself backside against the wall, then she ran 30 feet down the hallway. I called “Wait”, and she stopped and turned to face me.

19 or 20 years old. Slim. Full body tan, shaved pubis, belly ring, hummingbird ankle tattoo.

???!!!????

 

I grabbed a towel from our bathroom, right next to the door, and held it out saying “Here”.

She ran back to me, and grabbed the towel and wrapped it around herself. She started to explain that she had been ‘dancing for’ and ‘partying with’ 3 guys….3 ‘umpires’, she kept saying…. and somehow she had ended up in the hallway. She was very drunk and/or high, and she couldn’t remember what room she had been in on our floor. I asked her if she remembered any names, and she gave me one. I called the desk and asked for this man’s room number, but they wouldn’t provide it. They did, however, put me through to his room, and I could hear the phone ringing, although I couldn’t pinpoint the room, and he, and his 2 cohorts, would not answer. I rang back the operator, and explained that a young woman had been put out of a  room by 3 men, and that she needed help getting her clothing back, and asked that security come to the floor.

I went out to join her in the hall, and she then remembered the room number, so I rapped on their door.

They still would not open the door.

I was really starting to wake up then, and I saw this girl, with the towel now wrapped around her nudity, and her intoxicated state, and her obvious ‘professional’ standing, and her blistered and taped feet, raw from ‘dancing naked’ for callous strangers, and her residual innocence..

I rapped again, and then I told her loudly “Security is coming, and they will help you get your clothes back. Hopefully, someone will let you in so you can get your clothes and go home”.

The bastards still wouldn’t open the door.

They didn’t open the door until security came…the security guy was going to open the door right away, but I warned him that there were 3 men inside, rather than the one who was registered to the room. He had the operator emergency ring the room. Finally, some spiky headed goof ball cracked open the door.

 

The girl squeezed through the door opening and started to cry and to yell at him.

 

I asked the security man to wait and make sure she made it out of the hotel safely, and he said he would.

He was still there when I peeked out 5 minutes later.

 

My family and I joked about this situation throughout the weekend….my elderly uncles said I should’ve sent her to their room ( when they were feeling spry), and then asked me to ‘call off the girl’, when they were tired.

I told them she was very young. There were more jokes about how ‘they’d feel ashamed of themselves………in the morning, ha, ha, ha’

We talked about stripping Uncle Lenny down, and throwing him out in the hall when he drank too much, and stayed too long ….yuk, yuk, yuk, guffaw.

 

The wedding was beautiful…..young cousin, about to enter his residency for Ear, Nose and Throat….and his bride, taking time off from researching the effects of antibiotics on pigs at the University of Calgary and for Abbot Pharmeceutics.

 

I looked to the news for any sporting events in town that might’ve supported a gang bang’s worth of ‘umpires’, and there was a 3 on 3 basketball tournament going on at the West Edmonton Mall. (Update: Giving credit where credit is due, upon googling the remembered man’s name, and the term ‘umpire’, I found that the bastard who answered the hotel room door is affiliated with the Triple A Pacific Coast Baseball League. I guess the Edmonton team had a few home games that weekend)

 

At the wedding, guys with rockabilly type side burns from Medicine Hat…oil riggers….asked me whether I thought George Bush would be voted in again. It wasn’t clear whether they were for it or against it, because they loved the new work, but thought the whole deal was built on a foundation of lies.

Politics are a common language in Canada, and people discuss it like Americans talk about the weather. It’s our protection….

 

But if you dance in strappy sandals long enough, you blister your feet.

 

And it costs alot to look beautiful, especially when you’re not.