Kate's Point of View

This is not about me, but it is funny so I am sharing.

Halloween weekend one of my friends went out to a costume party on a college campus. He’s my age – 28 – so knew he would be older than the student attendees of the party. Like most of us though, he still feels the same as he did in college so thought it would be no big deal.

Now my friend, we’ll call him Tony, because that is indeed his name, is a little on the lazy side when it comes to costumes. His usually strategy is just to wear a funny t-shirt and call it a day.

True to form, Tony wore a t-shirt reading “I’m what Willis was talking about.” It’s funny, right?

Well, people didn’t get it. He tried to explain.

“I’m what people were talking about.”

Blank stares.

He stressed the word “I’m” more and more in each explanation, but it didn’t help.

Finally, one person looks at him and says, “Sorry, I was born in 1987.”

Wonder Boy and I had a fun-filled weekend that began with belly dancers and ended with NASCAR. Can it get any better?

On Saturday night we headed downtown to watch Ira Glass, host of This American Life on NPR, speak as the keynote speaker for Cincinnati Writer’s Weekend. He spoke in a beautiful old hall and the place was packed with liberal public radio listeners. I have never seen so many black glasses frames!

Ira was good, as we knew he would be. He got me fired up about writing and being creative and reminded me why I do what I do. He explained his process for making This American Life such a popular, well-listened to show and how you could apply it to other things. But mainly he showed how you can take the process of being a good creative writer and radio host and apply that to giving an excellent speech.

Wonder Boy and were fired up with Ira Goodness so we headed back to my place (I had to change out of the newly purchased f-me shoes into something a little more practical) and headed up to a neighborhood bar. Now to explain, Wonder Boy and I recently bought a house in a college town. We live surrounded by students, and I like it. Students are funny and young and creative and unmarred by the realities that adults just accept as normal. They are also heavy drinkers, bad drunks and horrible parallel parkers.

At the bar on Saturday night, where they carded Wonder Boy and I to make us feel good, we sat at the bar next to people in various stages of drunk. A slurring-ly drunk girl and her friend approached three of the gentlemen at the bar explaining their mission to find a boy to take the one girl’s V card. (This same V card had been the cause of a break up the night before and what better way to snub you ex-boyfriend than to lose your virginity one night later in a night of random, drunken sex?) Of the three men at the bar, they didn’t approach the obvious, slutty chap, nor the semi-decent looking guy. No, they approached the nastiest of them. His reaction time, hindered by an evening of drinking, was slow and he was too busy being slack-jawed to say that he would, of course, deflower the drunken girl. This pause lost him the score and I am pretty sure, based on the water I saw her drinking later, that the girl kept her V card in tact for another night.

Now really, Ira and watching drunk college students. Does it get better?