Category: It Happened to Me

In response to my last posting, a reader asked if I had “some wacky story in the spirit of your blog” in which the True Spirit of Christmas is featured.

My answer: Yes.

It will never be turned into a Family Channel special or one of those cloying-yet-charming ads by the Mormons, but if someone ever comes up with a show called A Very Extreme Christmas, it might fit in.

(Yup, it’s a repeat from last year and I pointed to it recently, but the blog’s picked up a whole new readership over the past month, due in part to this cute redhead.)

I attended Gideon Strauss’ blogger convivium last night, playing the role of “the ambassador from Accordion City“. It was finally a chance to meet Gideon, whom I knew only through his blog and some communication via email and blog comments. I rather like meeting people whose work I read and enjoy, and sometimes some very interesting things happen.

I had a nice hot mug of Gluhwein, a bowl of excellent potato-leek soup, and some excellent conversation with the crowd that ran the gamut of urban planning (“Have you ever notcied that suburban architecture seems to make the storage of cars its number one priority?”) to people switching from one demonination of Christianity to another (“They’d signed a temporary mutual non-burning pact, and the part of the phrase that got me was the word temporary“) to the very sweet concern for my well-being of Summer and Shimmer, the Strausslings (“If you’re out all night, do you sleep during the day? When do you go to church?”).

I didn’t get a chance to give my answers to Summer and Shimmer, so here they are: “Well, I ususally don’t sleep in later than noon on Sundays, and I’m often up earlier”, and “Not as often as is proscribed, but more often than my rather secular friends think. There’s a nice mass at St. Mike’s at 5:00 p.m., which is well past the span of most hangovers, and a charming cantor-and-guitar mass at 9:00 for procrastinators and accordion-playing pop-culture aficionados who happen to be shopping at the nearby HMV around that time.”

There was some singing too. I pulled out the accordion, Angela alternated between piano and violin, and others made use of the Strauss’ collection of interesting percussion instruments. We started with some Christmas carols and later, a few hymns. Carols tend to be universal, but I recognized the melodies of only half the hymns, coming from a rather different branch of Jesus Fan Club. I recognized the words — a good number of hymns crib their lyrics from the Psalms — but the melodies were unknown to me. It’s like being a speaker of North American English being telported to downtown Sheffield, where “apples and pears” means “stairs”, a “lorry” is a truck and “lunch” means “an owl, deep-fried in its own feathers, smeared in mayonnaise”. They asked me to play some of my busking numbers, and did Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild, All My Love in response to a request for Zep, Fatboy Slim’s Praise You, Cecilia when Bethany found Angela’s Simon and Garfunkel songbook, and my rendition of Jim Breuer’s impression of The Hokey Pokey if AC/DC covered it.

I had a wonderful time meeting the Strauss family and guests at the convivum. I’ll cut-and-paste some thank-yous from Gideon’s blog:

Thank you to Will, Sarah, Darren, Chris, Kathy, Ray, Jake, James, Brian, Nicole, Rich, Rob, Joey, Daniel, Bethany, Summer, Shimmer, and Angela, for a most convivial convivium!

And thank you, Gideon!

(You might want to look at Last Friday’s Party, party 1 first.)

Melee

After the “No, I was not checking out your breasts, but now that you have accused me of doing so, it is taking all my will not to” incident, I made my way to the table to help myself to some green and red pepper slices and dip. To the left of the veggie tray was a bowl of potato chips.

Oh evil carbs, I thought, how I sometimes long for your starchy, yet loving embrace.

Beside the bowl of chips was a couple making kissy-faces. He was an Asian guy with hipster hair, all pell-mell hair, like every Asian hipster is all those hair gel advertisement has. She was “the girl next door”, white, with straight brown hair, wearing a red hoodie zipped up over a Gap t-shirt. They were a cute couple, and sort of reminded me of me and The Redhead, which made me smile. The cute couple were saying their goodbyes and slowly making their way towards the door.

A few minutes later, after I’d joined in a conversation, there was a thump to my left. A guy with whom I’d been talking to earlier had been thrown down onto the floor, clipping the table with his arm on the way down. The force with which he hit the floor was strong enough to jolt the CD player from playing the dance hits of 1993 into silence.

Standing over him, with the look I could only describe as “murderous”, was Kissy Face Guy, his fists clenched and pacing from side to side, staring at his intended victim. He made a cursory kick at his victim’s left leg. Realizing that the guy on the ground was lying with his legs apart, he swung his right foot back, in preparation for making the coup de grace in that most vulnerable of points.

He never connected. The guy to whom I was talking and I dragged his intended victim out of the way and were already blocking his path, while other guys had managed to pin his arms back.

“Take him outside and let him cool off,” someone said.

“Look,” said Kissy Face Guy, “I just wanna apologize to him.”

Kissy Face Guy walked close to the guy he’d thrown to the ground and reached out to offer a hand as a peace offering. At the last minute, he turned his extended hand into an attempted right cross. He missed, and the two guys who’s restrained him earlier dragged him to the balcony, where they hoped that the quiet and frigid night air would calm him down.

“You all right?” I asked Thrown To Floor Guy.

“Yeah. I don’t get it. We were in the hallway, all I said was ‘Hey’, and the next thing you know, he’s shoved me to the ground.”

Thrown To Floor Guy excused himself and went to the kitchen to get a beer.

“That was pretty weird,” said a woman beside me.

“Here’s something to think about,” I said to her. “When’s the last time you saw a fight break out at a house party?”

She glanced upward in thought for a moment. “Ages. Maybe…high school. Uh-huh, high school.”

“Same here,” said another guy. “I’ve seen a fight break out outside a club, but even then, the guys who do that are maybe twenty-two.”

(This crowd was all in their late twenties or early thirties.)

I tried to remember the last time I saw a fight break out at a club. It’s been a while; the closest thing in recent memory was the incident with Kitchener Girl and the Gap Ninjas.

Later on, we found out that the two guys involved in the altercation told markedly different stories. Kissy Face Guy said that while they were inching their way down the long skinny corridor leading to the door, Thrown To Floor Guy groped Girl Next Door, his kissy-face partner — it was like Rashomon, twenty-first century cocktail party-style.

Here’s a killer photo of Paul during his taekwondo demo taken by our friend Josh Meles. It’s taekwontacular!

The rest of Josh’s photos are here, my photos are here, and the videos I shot are here.

Here are the videos from Paul’s black belt demos. They’re all in QuickTime format, and 2MB or less.

• Paul and the initiates perform the 8th form.
• Paul’s first demonstration: board smashing.
• Paul’s “Matrix” demo, part one: a running start, running up a wall and then a reverse kick to break a board.
• Another “Matrix” demo. Nice!
• A feat of strength and insanity: Paul breaks concrete with an open-hand punch.