pistol packin' mama

pistol packin' mama
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday, my friends and I threw a baby shower for our friend Jen at my house. This was more difficult than it sounds, because on Friday night I made the in retrospect terrible decision to drink a few Little Kings with Charlie at the DeSoto. Little Kings, if you don't know, are what they drink in hell. They're like evil alcoholic double agents - they look innocent and seem charming, but they're actually plotting against you. I thought, having encountered them before - Charlie is inexplicably addicted - that if I used Math and was careful with their 7 ounce bottles, I would be okay. I was not okay despite my calculations and neither was he and I highly disrecommend those oh so innocent little green bottles unless, that is, you really were planning to spend a day being completely miserable. So very little got done in preparation for the shower on Saturday and thus I had to get up early on Sunday and go berserk in the kitchen.

That worked out okay, though. Back when we were planning this shower about a month ago I suggested that we tiedye onesies as a party activity and, that being received well, I had duly gone and gotten all the materials we needed for this project as well as some extra baby stuff from the Goodwill. Yeah, I had a baby oriented week last week. First, I dug through baby clothes for 100% cotton stuff at the thrift store, which took me back about two decades to the days when I haunted Value Village for the rare, the elusive, the second hand Hanna Anderson striped baby suit of cuteness. Then I went to Babies R Us, a freaky place where I discovered that there are far cooler baby clothes available to the general public nowadays than there were back then and then I browsed around Amazon and Etsy and Thinkgeek for even more super cool baby stuff. All babies all the time and then, if that wasn't enough, as I was walking back to the car on Haywood Road after buying procion dyes at Earthguild for the shower, I nearly got run over by a giant red plastic bus thing full of infants and toddlers. Now I am terrified and doubling up on the old birth control lest I, like my friend Jen here, end up with more than just a pistol.

I hadn't done any tiedying in years and the directions were not what I was remembering at all, so I called my old tiedye friends in a panic right before the activity was supposed to start. Alas, they didn't really remember all the fiddly little details either, like do you soak the clothes in urea or washing soda or what, but fortunately, the internet never forgets, and here, if you should be interested in this fine old party activity or need to dye your dog* or something, is the recipe we used, which worked out beautifully. We used mason jars and spoons instead of squeeze bottles and everything, including the old Devo t-shirt I used up the dye with, looks great. Okay, yes, this poor child's first words will probably be "I don't want to be a hippie anymore!" but he will be stylin'. Asheville stylin', that is. They came out so well that this morning I briefly considered a career in tiedying baby clothes because nobody in Asheville has ever thought of that before.

Besides tiedying everything in sight, we also ate shrimp and grits and biscuits and mini quiches and egg and caviar dip and deviled eggs and cookies and cake and toasts from homemade bread and managed to drink an entire giant bottle of vodka, so a good time was had by all. All parties should start at 1 in the afternoon, I have decided, because I not only stayed up long after everyone else had departed or gone to bed, I cleaned up the entire house. This was stupid, because now here I am with absolutely no excuses for not getting things, like writing a book or finding a job or starting a party planning business - there's a future in catering tiedye parties! Right? - done.

However I do not intend to let that distract me too long from my life of sloth. Anyway, I've been reading bad murder mysteries from the Goodwill again and I have realized that a body should be showing up in my life any day now, since that seems to be the fate of middle aged women: we find a body, we have sassy back and forth conversations with our girlfriends and our adult children, we discover clues, we meet a handsome, brooding yet sexy homicide detective who is way better than our conveniently dead or divorced husband and then, whoa, we solve the crime. Probably it will turn out, as you can tell from the picture, that Jen did it.

* do not use procion dyes to dye your dog, you idiot. Use food coloring. This is how I made my brother's shih t'zlivingroom, Phineas, red, white and blue for the long departed and much lamented I Am An American Day Parade in east Baltimore, back in the days when I was still looking for 100% cotton maternity clothes in Value Village my own self.