The Piano Bar

The room was starting to spin a little bit.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have gulped down the Cosmopolitan so fast.

And the appletini.

Then there was the jello shot…

Ugh.

Normally I never drink that much. But it was my bachelorette party and dammit, I was going to enjoy myself.

If I kept up that pace though, I was going to wind up enjoying myself on the floor.

And okay, technically I wasn’t a bachelorette—I had been married for 10 years. But I never got one the first time around. Because I was seven months pregnant.

“What are those lemon things?” I asked my best friend Jennifer. She and Mindy, another friend, had driven from Ohio so they could attend the vow renewal. I was staring at some lemon drinks that the waitress had just walked by with.

“I don’t know,” Jennifer answered and then caught the waitress’s attention and was like, “Can we have those lemon drink things?”

It turns out that they are called lemon drops.

And lemon drops, I came to find out, tasted like lemonade.

With booze.

Dangerous.

I think I had 3.

So it was a good thing that I was called up to the stage BEFORE I was too intoxicated because I don’t know what I would have done. (I imagine I’d have done a dance that in my head I thought was sexy but really looked like a drunken mess…)

I forgot to mention we were in a Piano Bar.

And that Mindy and Jennifer had filled out a paper saying we were at my bachelorette party.

There I was sipping my drink and I hear the piano guy say, “Amber needs to get her ass up here. She’s getting married tomorrow!”

Then I nearly choked on my drink.

I do NOT like being the center of attention. At all. This was why I refused to leave my chair. I believe I clamped my legs around it but the piano guy was NOT letting up.

“Amber! You’re only going to prolong this. I’m not going to stop. Get up here!”

I debated running out of the bar. But then Jennifer said she’d go up with me. Actually, I probably forced her to come up. I would not let go of her arm.

It didn’t help that it was a Friday night and the place was PACKED! Everyone was staring at me as I went up.

Then the piano bar guy was like, “Jump up on my piano,” and I wanted to say, “Jump up? Do you realize how uncoordinated I am?” (Had I been drunk, I’d have coyly said, “Your piano? Is that code for something else?”) If I jumped up, I’d fall off. Luckily he saw the horror on my face and pointed out a stool which I used to climb up on the piano.

And then I refused to look out into the audience because the second I did that, I wanted to throw up because everyone was LOOKING. I mean, duh, where else where they supposed to look? But still.

I was glad when it was over and hurried back to my seat.

However, the video seemed to set off a bunch of strange people coming to our table.

For starters, this lady:

She bought us shots of some whiskey/mint/ice cream concoction. I took one sip and knew I couldn’t handle it.

Jennifer, being the great friend she is, drank all three shots in hopes that this old lady would leave us alone.

But she didn’t.

She stayed there and rambled on about how one of the piano guys was gay and did we have Facebook and oh, how did we find a guy because she couldn’t find anyone?

I think she stayed with us for oh, a half hour?

And then after she left, a group of guys from a Bachelor party came over. They had lost the bachelor and seemed nonchalant about it. “He’s probably passed out around here somewhere,” one guy said.

Um.

These guys kept asking us if we wanted to go back to their room to go in the hot tub. We declined.

They reeked of smoke. I wanted them to go away.

They didn’t.

They stayed until we ended up leaving and kept asking us to not to go. You could tell these guys were total assholes. One guy kept saying he didn’t understand how people could get married to begin with.

Still.

It was a fun night.

By the time I left my head was swimming and when I got back to the hotel room Tom was fast asleep.

“Dkflkadfljk,” I mumbled as I climbed into bed beside him.

“What?” he grumbled.

“Dfklafjdsklj,” I repeated. It sounded like real words to me.

“WHAT?”

“I’mgladImarriedyou,” I said. “And that you don’t smell like smoke.”

Tom was silent and then he replied, “Uh, thanks?”

And then naturally the kids woke up early the next morning and I had a headache plus a dry mouth.

However, it was all worth it.