a dinner party and some drinking in stacyville

I’m not a dinner party type of girl. Nacho party? Yes. But I associate dinner part with hoity toity-ness and that’s just not me. Saturday’s dinner party was 2.5 hours away in a town with the population of 500 and was the most awesome idea ever known to man to feed a bunch of people at your house.

There were 14ish (I can’t remember exactly) people there and we were all in charge of making our own dinner, which has rude as it sounds – I mean, c’mon, invite us to dinner and make us make the damn thing? – it was absolutely awesome.

We were all split up on different teams. My team – TEAM C REPRESENT!! – was in charge of the marinade for the chicken and the salad. There may have been something else, but we were a little slow on the game, since one of our team members is 9 and measuring fresh basil and rosemary is hard to figure out even for me. And then there was Moscato involved, so yeah.

Dinner actually turned out ridiculously awesome. Our menu consisted of:

• Salad with almonds, dried apricots and champagne vinaigrette
• Chicken under a brick (except we skipped the brick because it had a caterpillar on it)
• Tuscan white beans (so good that people had it for whatever course is in between the main course and dessert)
• Fallen Chocolate Cakes (with whipped cream we all asked for refills)

There was a massive group cleanup effort and then Catchphrase came out. Luckily, no one was injured in the throwing of said game, although it was close. Somehow I managed to get my team to guess Ebb Tide. It ended in an 1-1 tie. And then the grownups (minus Trav) decided it was time to go for a walk to the bar/bowling alley.

Earlier in the day, Amanda and I had talked about walking to the bar, ordering a shot and then leaving to come back to Sarah and Trav’s. Amanda was going to do rub her booty on an Iowegian, but she was going to go solo in that act.

Our bar plan turned into a group outing that lasted five or six hours. You know those scenes in movies where the city slickers walk into a bar full of cowboys and regulars and all the music stops and the bartender drops something glass and it breaks and you can hear the wooden chair scoot across the floor? Yeah…

The first interaction we had with anyone was someone saying, “Aren’t you a rapper?” to Jon. We think it was because he was wearing a child size Mario hat, but hey – I guess he could totally be a rapper. All of the tables were full, so we found the lone table over in the four lane bowling alley and commandeered that bad boy. And then the rest of the night went down like this:

• A round of five drinks cost $13.75, regardless of the combination of drinks
• The preferred drink of Gerb’s in Stacyville, Iowa, is Busch Lite in a can.
• We couldn’t have lemon drops, because they had no citrus vodka and no lemons.
• Ordering a Coke got us a can of Coke and a shot of Captain came in a plastic shot glass.
• Cranberry juice does not last long when two people in the whole bar are drinking it and when that runs out, the bartender suggests…
• Cherry Dr. McGillicuddy and Sprite, which Sarah and I happily drank.
• The bartender was unsure about Sex on the Beach (the drink, not the act), so Jon and I guessed at what went in it and Amanda and Sarah drank them without complaint, so obviously we’re good at guessing.
• Amelia ordered a 7 and 7, and the bartender had to go digging around to find the Seagram’s. He was very proud when he found it.
• A lady grabbed the mic away from the two man guitar duo that was playing to sing a song to her friend Ricky, who was the one wearing the maroon vest. It went “Hey Ricky, you’re so fine, you’re so fine, you blow my mind. Hey Ricky.”
• Some dude in a backwards bedazzled beanie came and took Jon’s picture, so we followed him into the bar to take his picture.
• We met #BeardTrav, who hung out with us a good chunk of the night, drinking the mandated drink of locals – Busch Lite, and telling us about his life living in the country and working on the river. He was a nice dude!
• At different times, Amelia and I had conversations with ladies in the bathroom about an upcoming euchre tournament and a weak bladder.
• #BeardTrav didn’t mind that we called him #BeardTrav. It was logical, since Sarah’s husband is Trav and my brother is Trav. Drunk logic wins.
• And then I tracked down the owner of the bar (which was a complete fluke – he just happened to be the first person I ran into) and he took this picture so we could capture the memory of our night:
• 

THE END.