Ground Control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on...

Once upon a time back in 1977 - before D. and I were married - he got a phone call out of the blue from an old friend he hadn't seen in 4 or 5 years. This guy had tracked D. down, and wanted to get together to "share some big news". Plans were made, but when the day of the visit arrived, D. discovered that he had to work, so I was left alone to greet his long lost buddy.
When the knock came at the door of my tiny apartment, I was a little uncomfortable, but D. had told me enough about the guy that I figured - hey, what could go wrong? We'd hang out and shoot the breeze and everything would be fine.
Except - when I opened my door, there was a 500 pound guy standing there.
I panicked, because noone had said a word about the guy being bigger than Andre the Giant, and my apartment was two rooms and a closet with nowhere to sit except the bed - which had a large wicker chest full of fragile stuff crammed underneath it.
The guy and I milled around for a bit, making really small talk in my really small kitchen - until he asked, "Can we just sit down?"...which we did, avoiding eye contact as the sound of breaking glass filled the silence in the room.
The visit went downhill from there; it was a 24 hour binge of bizarreness that included
meeting the guy's mistress in the evening, and his 18 year old fiancee the next day.
His mistress was 57 or 58 (he was 23); she was ravaged and hard, like an extra
from that Mickey Rourke movie "Barfly". And his fiancee was 18, straight out of an
ABC After School Special about that lonely girl who keeps making all the wrong choices.
Somehow, D. and I got trapped into an 'engagement' brunch for these people,
at a place called The Silver Pear - which is really where this post has been heading all along.
That dismal engagement brunch, featuring D., me, the fiancee and the giant,
took place in a dusty, dimly-lit place that felt more like a funeral parlor than
"the place you'll want to be when it's time to celebrate."
Hideous foiled wallpaper glared from every wall, and there was enough
gaudy silver plate to sink a battleship. Fake ivy, festooned with (you guessed it)
silver pears was draped and wrapped and crawling all over,
and I swear that even the grains of salt in the shakers were engraved
with a cloying plea to "let us create YOUR silver lining."
Somewhere between the staff's robotic peppiness
and our hosts incessant groping and wedding goo-goo-gooing ,
D. and I realized that we might be the only human beings there.
There was so little common ground (most of which had to be avoided anyway), that conversation began a slow, agonizing death that promised to go on forever.
Sitting there, on our ridiculously dainty wrought-iron chairs, eating damp little triangles
of wallpaper paste and toast, D. and I were like alien abductees; chained together in abject misery, frantic to return to planet Earth.
And until yesterday - that experience has remained my most awkward
social experience.
The pinnacle, bar none.

Tune in tomorrow for part two - Where brown shoes learns a painful life truth:
once an abductee, always an abductee....