Girls' Weekend Mashup. Or Sample.

Imagine if you will that your girlfriend won a weekend stay at a geodesic dome on Washington's Pacific shore, and that she was kind enough to invite you along, buy you some cocktail makings, snack box, red-velvet petit fours, and for heaven's sake, a camel colored Snuggie to wear while you kick off the holiday season a little early by watching White Christmas on DVD and listening to the November beach wind howling outside.


Of course, I don't have to imagine it, only acknowledge my good fortune at hitting the weekend jackpot yet again. After the snack, cocktail, and Bing Crosby combo and a luxurious night's sleep in the geodesic loft, I had a long walk on the windy gray beach and time to catch up on back issues of the New Yorker. Liver, down, erudition, up slightly. In the afternoon we explored the nearest tourist/beach town, a place almost entirely devoid of village-type charm, with weird little strip malls bunched up along a rigorously divided highway-type road. We hit a souvenir shop enticingly named "Eye Candy," which was positively chockablock with seashell-themed merchandise. The homemade ice cream and fudge shop next door was also kind enough to stay open in the off season, and while we enjoyed a cone apiece, Ice Cream Shop Radio played a current song that uses the refrain from a vintage Hall and Oates hit. You know the one. Thus began the debate on what constitutes a mashup vs. a sample. I read (OK, skimmed) the Wikipedia articles on both mashups and sampling, and I still don't think I can answer the question with any authority.

Anyway, back to the dome for more snacking and magazines, and in the evening, back to the town to visit the Irish pub, which had advertised live music and implied fish and chips.


The live music was a guy at once loathesome and lovable, playing a truly random assortment of songs (Danny Boy? Yes. Take the Skinheads Bowling? Yes.) on the guitar and sometimes the piano. At one point he started "Blister in the Sun," and somehow the lyrics to "Might Like You Better if We Slept Together" crept in. OK, so, mashup? Sampling? At the last minute it switched to "The End of the World as We Know It," so ultimately we had to conclude it was...a medley? The highlight for me was a singalong to the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," the lowlights I will refrain from cataloguing.

So, already a Saturday night to remember, right? But while the music played, two couples came in, pointedly dressed in their pajamas. My friend gave them a friendly interrogation on the way back from the Ladies', and that is how we ended up leaving "Galway Bay" and heading to the IGA (the town's grocery store) for Moonlight Madness. The IGA was hopping, the place to be in your pajamas and bathrobes, buying three pounds of Cornish game hen for $4.99, or, like the elderly man we bumped into on the way in the door, a half-priced case of Monster energy drink.


We spun the wheel of cheese (though we did not win the Emmenthaler), we bowled with a frozen turkey and eight two-liters of 7-Up (though I didn't even make contact with the soda, weakling that I am), and we jumped onto orange numbers taped to the floor whenever the lucky number announcement came across the PA.

Thus did I resurrect my streak, winning a ten dollar gift card on lucky number 9. What a weekend!

Back on the Eastside, every weekend is a Girls' Weekend. Muriel got her witch on, and Naomi, who already has considerable practice, was her cat.


Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Jim also got to take the girls to a princess party for one of Naomi's school friends. Apparently Snow White, the REAL Snow White, according to Naomi, was there, inexplicably doing magic tricks and painting kids' forearms instead of their cheeks.


Times are hard, even for the princesses.