The Beer-Goggle Saga

I’d like to talk about an annoying fashion item that I keep trying to throw out of my closet-my ‘beer goggles’. No matter how many times I try to get rid of the pesky spectacles, they just keep reappearing. I’m sure everyone knows what beer goggles are but just in case you don’t -it’s when people start looking more attractive as soon as you’ve had a few drinks. Some will even try to glamorize the moniker and call them “champagne goggles” but I know the truth. Any which way you spin it, beer goggles are a treacherous thing to wear. People have been to know to chew their arms off to escape from a scary lover’s embrace after they sobered up and taken off the deceptive culprits.

Now some of you that have seen the movie “Shallow Hal”- you know- the one where the guy keeps seeing big unattractive girls as beautiful slim girls because he can see their “inner beauty” instead of their outer beauty. You might think to yourself- what’s wrong with letting go of your preconceptions about beauty, just go by pure chemical instinct and let your raw animal cravings take over? Well obviously, you’ve never mistakenly agreed to go on a date with a man whose ears looked like Mr. Spock's or woken up with a man whose double chin was so big, he looked like he had a 'muffin-top' neck.

Sooo, I was commerserating with a girlfriend one afternoon. I had played wingwoman with her the night before on Wyndham Street. Some bankers had been buying us shots when she spied a tall man across the dark crowded bar and decided that he was her prince charming-at least for the night. He looked decent so we skillfully extracted ourselves from the guys we were talking to. I was thankful because I had been SO bored talking to this short blasé guy while my girlfriend chatted to the better-looking of the two. But alas, that’s what good wingwomen do. Wingwomen keep the less attractive guys occupied while your friends chat up the ones with true potential. In any case, she had just broken up with her boyfriend and my sole mission for the evening was to cheer her up.

Anyway, in a quest to distract her from her broken heart, we cooked up a plan to sashay our way over to the tall guy’s vicinity. He was with a group of friends and again, it was my duty to distract the others so the tall one could focus his attention on HER instead of his drinking buddies.

My girlfriend and her prince hit it off like a house on fire and I got stuck talking to his boorish crony. His friend was speaking at a speed that only someone who was snorting something could manage and spewing so much arrogant BS, that it took all my energy not to vomit on his suit. The only way I could tolerate him was to drink more booze. 2 cocktails and a shot later, I couldn’t take it anymore so I decided to bid them adieu. My girlfriend stayed behind to entertain herself with her tall dark knight.

Sufficiently frustrated with the caliber of men I had encountered elsewhere, I ended up at Dragon-I and met a guy near the models table who I thought looked like an obscure character actor. He told me he was a diamond dealer (brownie points!) and we had, what I thought, was an amazing conversation. However, what we actually spoke about eludes me completely. The truth was- I had drank so much (in the vain attempt to become interested in anything that the bores of the evening had to say) that unbeknownst to me, I had found my beer goggles and managed to pop them on by the time I had met him.

I must say he was a gentleman though. We exchanged phone numbers and he walked me out of the club when I was too tired to totter on my heels any longer. He didn’t make any moves, he didn’t even try to kiss me. He just gave me a hug and promised to take me out the next day. When I got home, there was an SMS from him saying what a good time he had talking to me. I couldn’t believe that in a night of grey pebbles that I had actually mined a diamond!

So when my girlfriend and I reconvened the next day to debrief about the previous night’s antics- I was enthusing about my impending date with 'diamond man' while she was thoroughly disgusted with herself. Apparently she had gone home with the tall knight and when he took his clothes off, he ended up being a Skinny Minnie and his commanding height definitely didn’t match up to the package in his trousers. She said they kissed but she couldn’t bring herself to do anything more. However they did spend the night together. Sleeping.

When she woke up sober the next day, she saw that he had a really bad case of back acne and she was thoroughly grossed out. The kicker was when she went to the bathroom only to see some soap that was labeled specifically for back acne. EWWWW! Needless to say, she fled as fast as her Ferragamos could take her. “Anita,” she said ruefully “you really have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.” In the end, her prince turned out to be what I call a 'block-a-mo'- they only look good from a 'block or more' away.

Meanwhile, I was eagerly anticipating my HOT date that evening and my diamond actor actually called! He told me to meet him at a bar in LKF and when I got there, I didn’t see anyone that vaguely resembled an actor. I called him to ask him what he was wearing and he said he was wearing a white T-shirt. I looked around and the only one I saw in a white t-shirt was a chubby guy with a muffin top roll of fat over his jeans and a big bum. He turned around and I vaguely recalled his face. My jaw dropped-my actor had just turned into the biggest toad on the planet. At that point I nearly about-faced, but I remembered his gentlemanly approach and our nice ‘conversation’ and decided to give him a chance anyway.

He was with his friends from the night before. They were all poorly dressed and extremely average/borderline trashy. Talking to him was about as pleasurable as getting a root canal and each painful drop of conversation was like getting a tooth pulled. He was the guy from the night before but he definitely wasn’t the guy I imagined in my deluded, beer-goggled mind. Damn those distorted orbs of alcohol inspired lies! After a polite hour of chatting about banalities, I excused myself to ‘meet others for dinner’. The guy was begging me to stay but OH NO! Unfortunately, without the skewed view of those damn beer goggles, I wasn’t about to allow that frog to get anywhere near my lily pad.

Ribbit. Ribbit.
 

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