an entry somewhere else

Last night I joined a friend for a Christmas party. Yes, I know it’s well after Christmas but I really had nothing else to do this Friday evening. I figured, hey, it’s a party, I’ll meet some people, shake some hands, eat some food, get asked to sing karaoke and that would be it. I’m guessing there were about 100 people when we arrived around 7.15p. We sat down and were handed a four page program. Not those nice little sheets folded over at Christmas galas in the states but four legal size pages of hymns and other directions. My ‘darn, this is not going to be like I thought at all’ detector went off.

I had sworn off this type of ‘party’ unless I knew that person intimately. Damn. It all went well until the padre stepped up. He talked for nearly an hour. 100 or so people in a large room with even larger speakers, sweating. Great! The padre stepped down and a little girl went up to play ‘Jingle Bells’ on the keyboard, only all she did was hold down two or three chords. Nevertheless, she received encouraging applause. Then, the padre got back up for another round of prayer. This one lasted only ten minutes. This was followed by another clergyman. He went five minutes.

All of this might have been more interesting had I understood more than half of it. I looked at my watch and it was 9.15p by the time they started to give away door prizes and pass out dinner boxes. The woman in front of us apparently didn’t understand the door prize concept since she had ten numbers while those around her had none at all. We left as they were still calling numbers. The woman in front of us hadn’t won yet.

So, was your Friday night more exciting than mine?