Oy! It's So Humid!

Darlings,

It pretty much goes without saying, when you receive an e-mail from a Handsome Young Jewish Man telling you about a party hosted by Heeb: The New Jew Review, you pretty much have to go, even if it means leaving the cozy embrace of downtown. As hard as this might be to believe, yours truly got on not one form of public transit but three and ventured into the nosebleed North of beyond uptown to check out what was going down at the “Heeb Hop”. Because a smart girl is always prepared for any emergency, I’d forgotten both the address of the party and the cellular telephone number of the Handsome Young Jewish Man sitting on my desk at home- always a wise move when going to a neighborhood one is unfamiliar with. Since I did remember the name of the street the party was on, I figured I could probably find it if I set my Spidey-sense to “fun” and wandered around until my high heeled sandals led me to the location. Either that or get hopelessly lost. Fortunately, as soon as I stepped of the bus, I ran into the H.Y.J.M. who was walking to the party with his sister and sister’s sister-in-law.

I had not been to a party in a house that large since that gaggle of homosexual hairdressers whisked me off to an after-hours bash at the home of a rather wealthy eccentric a couple of years ago. I kept feeling like the owners of the house were about to show up and tell all us kids to get off the property before they called the cops. Goodness knows who's home it actually was. I'm sure it was a nice couple on vacation with no idea that a multitude of God's most chosen people were getting down in their livingroom.

So... who exactly goes to the New Jew Review party? Well, it was a crowd that I don’t usually spend a lot of time with. Very button down business casual. It was like the parties of my adolescence, except everyone was late-twenties-early-thirties-ish and most likely drove nice cars paid for with money earned from good jobs. My personal peer group tends to be a little lower on the scale of upward mobility. In fact, the only person I knew at the shindig, other than the H.Y.J.M. was an Asian fellow who’d participated in my last performance art project. The irony of gravitating to one of the only other non-Jews present was not lost on me. Guess my Gentile-radar was functioning at full capacity.

And, oh my darlings, it was humid! So humid in fact that it was virtually impossible to tell if it was raining, or if the air was just so warm and wet that it felt like it was made out of water. The dense congestion of human bodies did nothing to alleviate the condition, but the drizzle was a welcome break from the summer drought.

After my thermos of vodka ‘n’ soda had been consumed and before the band that had been threatening to play started up, the H.Y.J.M. offered me a lift home. We walked over to his parents’ house where he was parked and then headed southward to more familiar territory (well, more familiar to me- since his parents live up the street and around the corner, I’m pretty sure the H.Y.J.M. knows his way around that part of town reasonably well). Thank you to the folks at Heeb magazine for giving something to do on a Saturday night, and a reason to further explore the residential areas of this fair city.