Good time gals and The Green Rooms…

PictureGood time gals – Debs and Val.

     I think I mentioned I was married to an Englishman.  Val is one of the spoils of the our divorce.  Debs is her friend, and the only person I know who uses the “C” word the way her countrymen use “brilliant” – as a sort of omnipresent, verbal tic.   

     I think Val and Debs look like over-the-hedgerow neighbors on a British nighttime soap-opera in this picture.  I think they were also well into their cups, and preparing for a night at The Green Rooms.

   Val lives on the “British Riviera” in one of those drafty, Dickensian mansions that call to mind Jacob Marley rattling on the staircase after dark.  Just down a mossy, excruciatingly steep public staircase from her house, is a dark cave of a bar affectionately known as The Green Rooms.  I had the opportunity to go there on my most recent visit – when I was SEVEN MONTHS SOBER.  Why the capital letters you ask?  Because, like an anthropologist interacting  with an isolated tribe in the Rain Forest, I am probably the first and only person to ever observe the social mores and customs of The Green Rooms – SOBER.  

     I think it used to be a dock side storage facility, or a bunker during the war.  It seems like the kind of place frightened people would have cowered from German smart bombs.  The average age of The Green Rooms’ patron is about fifty-five, and even in the “flattering,” green strobe-lighting, it is obvious (present company excluded) they are ALL life-long smokers, drinkers and bad dressers.  There was a man in a Nehru-jacket, people.  And they did the TWIST to Beatles songs.   

     If you stand still too long at The Green Rooms, your feet stick to the floor.  It’s as if the entire place is made of used chewing gum…  I leaned like wainscoting along one wall,  trying to look FUN and NONJUDGEMENTAL, sneaking glances at my watch, as Val did a passable TWERK with what looked like the entire bar.

     Here’s the THING:  Dare I say it?  if I were drinking, The Green Rooms would be a bona fide Blast.


Picture

That’s Val and me when I was a DRINKER. What kind of mothers use their children’s party hats as Gaultier bras?

Today I’m not drinking because: that whole Madonna, Gaultier bra thing is kind of passé. 

How come you’re not drinking?