First of all….THANK YOU to all of you who were kind enough to comment last week on my plea for Shoebox Chronicles entries. I could never tell you how stuck I was and how much your support means to me. I’m going to get to several of them but today, let’s start with one from Pippa who asked:
“The best dinner party guests ever (alive or dead, but the dead ones would have to be alive because of a Time Travel Machine that you or someone you knew made, otherwise they would be really bad guests as they wouldn’t eat your food or talk and would smell and their head would fall off into some soup…)
Wait. What?
Okay, now I get it and I love me some Pippa for asking. I could tell you about bringing someone back from the dead and a great dinner we had where their head did not fall off in their soup but that would be too easy. So Pippa, I’m turning that question on it’s head and telling you about the worst dinner party in the history of….well, ever.
We had a friend over for a grill last year. A friend we don’t see often for reasons that are about to become clear to you because we don’t live very close to each other. Let’s all pretend we are in the witness protection program and call him BBQ Bill from now on…because I really don’t want him to ever find us again.
BBQ Bill shows up with his kids :45 minutes early while I’m still running around in a towel with curlers in my hair. Oddly enough, he has a HUGE cooler with him even though we told him not to bring anything. Normally, I’d assume our guest brought adult beverages but I was a bit confused as it was only the three of us (because in this house we have a strict one beer per child limit) (also, I’M KIDDING) and the cooler could easily hold two cases of beer and a few bottles of wine.
But it wasn’t beer and wine.
It was meat. At least 50 lbs of raw meat. Even though we told him we had the food covered. Beef, chicken, ribs, you name it. I’ve never seen so much raw meat outside of the grocery store. I’m not kidding you when I tell you what once was a small farm was now in that cooler.
So I looked at The Man and The Man looked at me and shrugged his shoulders (because we are both totally at the WTF??? portion of this story a mere :15 in, which is never a good sign) So we finally asked the million dollar question, “What’s with all the meat?”
At that point, BBQ Bill informed us he doesn’t have a grill at home so he’s going to grill this meat (50 lbs!) on our grill and store it for future dinners. Which, no big deal right? It wouldn’t be normally, no. But…the grill we bought is crap, and after about an hour or so of high heat, giant plumes of black smoke start to emerge and stain our house which is entirely white brick a lovely shade of grossness. Witness the setup:
Needless to say, The Man and I tend to be careful to avoid this very situation. Not that day. BBQ Bill took over the grill….for four hours. This, in and of itself, was annoying. Aside from the whole house turning black you should know that in the summer in Texas, we tend to grill and run inside because hell has nothing on us heat wise. Four hours of it and you are basically dealing with three adults soaked in sweat and smelling of charred flesh…which is to say, not my style. It was all too much…how much meat can one man grill? (50 lbs in case you weren’t following)
The fact that his son was pulling out our in ground sprinkler system and beating my children repeatedly in the pool was really the icing on the cake. (Kids will be kids!) With every thwack and every sizzle I cringed. At some point I’m fairly sure I ended up in the fetal position under the table sucking my thumb though the post traumatic stress disorder prevents me from remembering it all.
The Man did not think I would be able to endure. I did not think The Man would endure. Every time we thought he was done, another burger patty would magically appear and one of our children would scream in the distance. We were at a stalemate as to which one of us was going to go completely freak show and send them running to the street. Sadly, we are both far too polite and it never happened. Though our house, once white, now fully smoke black, was begging us to.
Hours later (eight in total for what was supposed to be a three hour get together), we got them out of our house with their cooler of full of meat, sprinkler system in serious need of repair and children now afraid of anything pole shaped.
As we burned the flesh off of our hands scrubbing with bleach to restore our house to it’s original color (it’s still not quite there) we pinky swore with our ragged fingers to never have them over again.
So thank you Pippa for the question….because just the other day I was thinking we hadn’t seen this guy in a while. Now I remember why.
Now y’all tell me…whats the worst dinner guest you’ve ever had and have you had them back since?
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