Devil Of An Evening I

(A portrait of a recent evening, in parts.)

Imagine a room full of young women, one more beautiful than the next--shiny hair, long legs, clear skin, gleaming teeth, short shorts, flouncy tops. Swirled around rounded cocktail tables, the women alternate between sipping bright red or yellow drinks from tall glasses with long, thin stems, and popping red hots past their glossy, pink lips.

One of the women, with strawberry blonde corkscrew curls grazing her angled shoulders, approaches our table. Clutching a reporter's notebook in one hand and a pen in the other, she clears her throat and speaks. "So, what's the worst thing your boss ever made you do?," she asks. Her words emerge uneasily, as though she's slightly ashamed of her probe. "Any of you experience your own 'Devil'?"

The girls at my table giggle and shake their heads with amusement, sun-kissed freckles dance along their narrow noses as they laugh. "No way!," says one of the girls, brushing a wisp of sandy blonde bangs out of her eyes. "My boss would never make me do anything remotely uncool. There's nothing but respect between us."

I shift my gaze to the bottom of my pineapple strawberry martini as the reporter scribbles on her pad. I feel her eyes on me and I look up. "And what about you," she says to me, her peaches-and-cream skin flushed from either excitement or the escalating temperature in the packed room. "Do you have any stories?"

I look up and speak before I think. "Well, there was this one thing; I had to fill an iPod with custom playlists from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, that I created. Then it became my job to fix any kind of problems with it, so next thing I knew, I was a t the Genius Bar on a Sunday evening with the thing."

Immediately, I wish I hadn't said a word. The reporter's face lit up like she had just swallowed a lightbulb. She wrote fast and furiously. "Wow, that's a good one. Who was your editor, can you say?"

This time, I think before I speak. "Err, no, sorry, I'd rather not. It was in D.C., anyway, and, well, she's a great woman and that was just this one time..." I stammer. Ugh. The girls around me shake their heads, but this time in disbelief--or is that sympathy?

"Woah, that really sucks," says the girl with the bangs. "But don't worry, you won't ever have to deal with that kind of stuff again..."

***to be continued...