Monday, July 21, 2008

Rowr

On Friday night a few weeks ago, I went to this magazine release party at the Oakland Museum of California with Zoelle and her mother. We started off the evening by eating dinner at this restaurant called Oasis. It specializes in West African food, which seems to involve a lot of beans, rice and plantains. The food was delicious, but there was one questionable aspect to the menu. My topping options for my black-eyed peas and rice were chicken, cod, and “meat.”

I accept that there may be some translation problems, but what is this mysterious “meat?” Pork? Beef? The flesh of naughty children? There are so many possibilities here, I was almost afraid to ask.

The party itself was a bizarre mix of twenty-somethings and fifty-year-old white women. As someone who’s easily pleased, I was quickly drawn to the circle of people standing around the acrobatic children in the courtyard. Apparently they belong to a circus school; they did some tumbling and crazy hanging rope tricks with no netting or safety harnesses. Watching them and clapping like a moron, I felt jipped. Not only did these kids get to join the circus, they didn’t have to run away from home to do it. As I grow older, it has become increasingly clear to me how much my parents hid from me.

There was also a prize table from Amoeba. And I won two four-day passes to this big festival. From the expression of the woman running the booth, this was a big prize. This is disappointing for both of us, because what I really wanted was the $10 tote bag. But I took my prize anyway, and started scoping the crowd.

It became readily apparent, as the night wore on and we wandered through the various exhibits, food stands, and members of a KISS cover band, that the middle-aged women had an objective. They moved with intent, through the throngs of slow-moving couples and . The women moved in packs,

One man behind me summed it up best. With a mixture of incredulity and fear, he said, “This is a cougar den!”

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