1.5.13 partying with mom (2004-11-21 07:52)
my long-term disdain for 20something ”party people” must officially end. there is something worse: 40 and 50something ”party people.” what i would do to erase the memory of last night.
so, my mother had been begging me to accompany her to some bigwig architect party in the hills. my mother works for a large prestigious architecture firm on Miracle Mile—they design all the hospitals and university buildings in the state and also many throughout the country as they have several branches. anyway, she tries to avoid taking my father to work parties as much as she can—she find him both antisocial and i am sure somehow socially unpresentable—so when i’m in town i get to be her date. usually there’s a way out but last night there wasn’t. she woke up a the crack of dawn and preparations began—all day i endured talk about this party and how 80 people would be there, how so-and-so would be there, how expensive his house is, etc. the problems began when we got there and in spite of it being freezing suddenly my mother took off her fairly respectable coat and got down to some skimpy sequined halter and instantly transformed into some girl gone wild. total insane social butterfly, floating from group to group—later i found out she didn’t even know half the people. she drank and drank (only red wine and apple martinis from their hired open bar) and avoided all food (she’s on a very restrictive new diet that she’s lost 15 pounds on, the french version of atkins basically) since it was all sugary and carby. she made her usual mockery of me—howling i was her sister, she had me very young, the usual jokes that people just ate up. and all along, i was invisible other than for the comment ”i can’t believe she’s your daughter! you MUST be sisters!” at a few points, mom even glared at me, when i tried to totally soberly answer back ”no, really, she’s my mom,” esp when the joke/flattery part seemed thin. also, since we were in some bizarre mountaintop and i have barely begun to drive again i was worried she’d be driving and she’d be drunk. i had one drink which might as well have been water. instead i watched her drinking and tried to fish drinks out her hands, reminding her of the treacherous drive and she kept snapping back, highly audibly so i suppose people could see what a cool wacky mom she was: ”Oh, shut up! I’m supposed to be the mom! Don’t tell me what to do!” Like a crazy alcoholic Cassavetes past-her-prime ingenue. Eventually i stopped being polite and made sure to snab in front of her friends that she was being ridiculous. meanwhile, people instead of respecting my cause, began bringing her drinks—a crazy Hong Kong aristocrat began hand-delivering her apple-martinis while telling me i had to ”loosen up—when i was your age i was all always drunk and all over the place.” i just stopped talking, wishing i could disappear again as usual (this becomes a very LA feeling for me) and waited until she was ready, four and a half hours into this hell. she grabbed the keys and insisted on driving and i… i let her. sometimes at points like that, i let whatever atrocity is awaiting do itself. i get very in touch with actually wanting to die. i get depressed enough that it doesn’t fucking matter and a car accident would save my mother and i from the terrible car-ride conversation that would ensue, that would either have to be cordial and phony or condescending and rude or just plain aggressive and bitchy, her drunkenness against my natural misanthropic surliness…
we made it though. once again, i live to tell.
as we left it began to thunder in a really intense apocalyptic way that it never does in LA. on the drive home, i saw a canyon in the distance on fire. we didn’t talk much. it rained hard. mostly i pretended to be asleep and only opened my eyes as i sensed home. we had no umbrellas and there we were both in velvets and silks, panty hose and heels. we ran from the garage to the door wearing wearing trash bags, probably the most appropriate visual of the entire evening.
