Wildness

The mystique of the Wild Woman has been somewhat of a running theme in my life. When I was a little girl, my father used to joke at the dinner table that he was about to go "chase wild women." When I was really young, I actually believed him, and I was horrified that a) MY daddy knew how to chase wild women and b) that he would say so right in front of my mom. As I grew older, I learned that my dad is the truest, bluest man on the planet and the mere thought of him chasing wild women was totally ridiculous. Not that he isn't totally adorable...just that he's too much of a gentleman to know what to do with one if he caught her. I'm pretty sure my mom is enough a handful for him anyway.

My mom is not a Wild Woman, but she is definitely a kick-ass woman in her own right. I've always felt that if I could be half the woman she is, I will be a better woman than most. When my mom gets a hair up her ass about something...well, let's just say it's best to stand back and let her do it until she finishes, fizzles out, or finds something else to tickle her fancy. When she gets in this mode, my dad lovingly refers to her as a "force of nature." Think 'tornado' and you're in the ballpark. One of my favorite examples would be the time she stayed up all night piping little frosting violets onto every single sugar cube for my brother's first wedding. Bear in mind, this brother is a proud member of AA, so the wedding reception had no booze, but lots of coffee, along with probably 500 or so lovingly hand-flowered sugar cubes. I digress.

My mom is a passionate music lover; mostly gospel, blues, and reggae. When I was in junior high, we attended St. Paul's Southern Baptist Church (probably the only black, southern Baptist church in the state of Idaho) just so my mom could hear live gospel music. The city is much more diverse now, but in 1987ish, the only other place in Boise where you might expect to see a non-white, non-hispanic person was on the Boise State football team, and even that was pretty pale. See?

http://varsityb.com/photo-galleries/?album=all&gallery=53&nggpage=3

So anyway, my mom really loves gospel music. When she isn't listening to gospel music, though, she listens to some of the nastiest, raunchiest blues you've ever heard. The nastiest of the bunch has to be Saffire - The Uppity Blues Women. These are middle-aged ladies with no time for innuendo, as evidenced by song titles like Bitch with a Bad Attitude, There's Lightning in These Thunder Thighs, and Silver Beaver (yes, that kind of beaver). It's basically middle-aged divorcee theme music.

Saffire didn't write this song, but they do a bang-up job with it, and it fits my theme nicely, so take a moment and listen to the Wild Woman theme song, Wild Women Don't Have the Blues.  

So, I have made a sincere attempt at being a Wild Woman this summer, but it turns out that I'm not so much a Wild Woman as a Wing Woman. No matter, I've been having a ball. Here are some highlights.

Wild Washington Women's Weekend
My girlfriends and I kicked off the summer with a trip to Chelan. It was a wild weekend at a lovely resort on the lake. The only rules: no kids, no pets, no husbands/boyfriends, and no responsibility. We spent a delicious day tanning on the dock and drinking "yards" of fruity cocktails. I think their "yard" glass was only about 2 feet long, but after drinking 3 of them, I think we can legitimately claim that we drank yards of booze.

 After dinner and a failed attempt at dancing at Chelan's only night club (so gross), we ended up partying back at the hotel with a group of late 20-somethings who were in Chelan for their annual guys' weekend. Correction. Half of the group partied up in the room with the 20-somethings, while I joined an expedition with a mission of accessing the resort's hot tub/pool area. Night-time security guards can be bought, but not necessarily for money. My girlfriend tried to bribe the security guard for pool access with $100, then with $200, and finally with a promise of boob. Guess which one brought him down from the parking garage with key card in hand? I blame the alcohol for this, but somehow my boob ended up being the one offered up. So I let the security guard touch a breast for three seconds and he let us in the pool area. Just to prove how much of a Wild Woman I am not...I swam in my sundress.

 Not long after the security guard let us in, a gaggle of girls (21-ish) scaled the fence on the other side of the pool and started swimming, topless. Guess what the security guard who likes boobs more than money did? Did he kick them out? Of course not. He pulled up a chair and tried pretty ineffectively to keep them quiet while one of them kept yelling "I have teeny tiny titties!" (I'm pretty sure I know why resort security dude chooses to work weekend nights. He probably does this every weekend, right?) We avoided the chaos and silently patted ourselves on the backs for being old and mature enough to keep our tops on.

If being a Wing Woman is about facilitating hookups, then I believe I attained epic Wing Woman status that weekend. Granted, only one of these hookups was intimate, but I think the others totally count as hookups.

• Hookup #1: The hot tub.
• Hookup #2: Towards the end of our day of afternoon drinking, the toilet flooded in our reduced rate hotel room with a view of the parking lot. I called down to the lobby and they sent someone over to jiggle the handle and start mopping. Normally that would have been fine, but I was drunk enough to march down to the lobby and tell the 20 year old behind the counter that there was no way that we should be paying $200 to stay in a toilet-water room. We got moved to a condo with a kitchen and a balcony overlooking the lake. Hooked up!
• Hookup #3: After finally climbing into bed at 4am, one friend and I put our shoes back on and headed out to the beach chairs on the dock so that another friend could invite a 20-something hottie back over to our room for some action. Out on the dock, we wrapped ourselves up in the little hand towels that were laid out on the beach chairs, laughed hysterically about how it was kind of like camping, and waited for the sun to rise over the lake. 
• Hookup #4: Due to different schedules, we had all arrived in Chelan at different times, in different vehicles. I was the first to leave for home on Sunday and was about half an hour out of town when my hot tub friend called me. She was scheduled to stay one more night, but was feeling so hungover that all she wanted to do was go home. I was feeling pretty groggy myself and was grateful to have company for the drive, so I turned around and picked her up. I hooked her up with her own bed that night. What's better than that?

Wilderness

I spent the first week of August in upstate New York for my brother's wedding. It was the most joyous wedding I've ever attended. A few years ago, this particular brother decided to get in touch with our Jewish cultural heritage and started attending a temple. Since his bride is Puerto Rican, their wedding was a glorious mix of both cultures. My mother was employed to bake cakes and she, in turn, employed my cousin and me as her baking assistants, and my sister-in-law's mother as a froster. Remember the frosted sugar cubes? Imagine two days of cake baking mania. She even monogrammed aprons for her crew. Here are the results:

One of the Jewish traditions that they adapted for their own purposes was a tisch. Traditionally, all the men gather with the groom, and all the women with the bride, to tell stories, tease, give advice, and just generally celebrate the honoree. Our tisch was not divided by gender, but along family/friend lines. It started with a passage from the Torah and a discussion of my brother's journey through the wilderness of bachelorhood (and Wild Women!), punctuated with lots of toasts of L'Chaim! By the way, I learned at the tisch that my uncle was the first to bring the concept of chasing wild women into our lives, so Dad is off the hook.

The tisch got me thinking a lot about tradition and community and stuff. I don't quite know how to say this and I think it's funny that this is the first real confession that I feel like I've put on this blog, but I've been thinking about exploring my own Jewish heritage a little deeper than my love of animal print. I've even gone so far as to look up different Reform (obviously, because bacon) congregations in my area. I doubt I'll go any further with it, but it's out there now and, if you know me at all, you know that's just weird. Weird, wacky, wild stuff. It strikes me that going to Temple could be something like a standing date for Friday nights. Who knows - maybe I could even meet a nice Jewish boy who can be corrupted with bacon!

Wild Wild West

Here's one final piece of wildness. I got a chance to chase - well, watch - wild men a few weeks ago. One of my friends and I went to see a western-themed, tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek, male burlesque show. It was SO MUCH FUN! Ladies - you need to go to an all male revue/burlesque. Sure, most of the dancers are gay, but they were delicious and scantily clad and came out into the audience to collect "Buckaroo Bucks" (sold in rolls of 60 for $20 and totally worth it) in their g-strings. Unfortunately, I didn't buy my Buckaroo Bucks until intermission and the second half was short, so now I have a bunch left over. I guess I'll just have to go again the next time they have a show. Yee-haw!