About lunch time on Saturday, Wendy calls. Wendy does catering, and is in a bind. Can I work a party that night? She quotes a tasty hourly rate. Since I had no plans for the evening other than to write some stuff for this journal, and the place is just down the street, I said sure.

So I show up at the appointed hour, at this mansion, ready to sling whiskey.

As is usually the case with this sort of thing, it's a completely disorganized Bohemian ClusterFuck. The hostess has decided to purchase all the whiskey and setups herself, rather than delegating that chore to somebody that actually has a clue. Consequently, there's boodles of stuff that we don't need (gallons of apple juice???) and not enough of what we do need, (unimportant stuff like ice).

The party started at seven, and was scheduled to run until midnight. We were out of stuff by eight-thirty. My efforts to push the apple juice went for naught. Why do folks with boodles of moolah think it makes them an expert on everydam thing?

The folks throwing this shindig were Indian, and he is a doctor. The party guests were evidently all contributors to some charity thrown by the host. They were uniformly rich, Indian, and in the medical field. His swankienda was located in just about the most prime real estate in this very exclusive subdivision, right on the shore of Lake Woodlands. The bar they'd set up for me to work was just a few scant feet from the water.

Across the lake and behind some trees is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, a major concert venue, and there happened to be a concert that night. The music came bouncing over the water to provide the soundtrack for the party.

I felt like I'd been airdropped into some Fellini film with no subtitles. Here I am, surrounded by turbaned, nehru'd and sari'd Indians, bejeweled and shining, chatting in a mix of urbane English and some native dialect that was, of course, totally incomprehensible to me, handing out gin and tonics to the tunes of the Scorpions, Dio, and Deep Purple.

One of the things we were chronically short of was pitchers for refilling water glasses. We had only two, in fact, for over two hundred guests. So we kept two waiters running around full speed trying in vain to keep up. In my conversations with the thirsty guests, who were crashing the bar thinking, incorrectly as it turned out, that certainly the bar would have water available, I had to bite holes in my tongue several times to keep from referring to the waterboys as "Gunga Dins."

I wasn't too sure how a joke related to the British colonial period would go over.

None of them seemed to be very concerned over the recent unrest there. One guy told me he was going to leave for a vacation back in the old sod later this week. They were to a man convinced that the Pakistani Poobah, Musharaaf, was playing both sides of the street, and using the States like a cheap whore. To a man, they blamed the haphazard way Great Britain precipitously abandoned their colonial possessions without ensuring peaceful transitions for the trouble in the area.

It's interesting to note that of all the hotspots burning holes in the peace, three of the major ones, Afghanistan, India/Pakistan, and Israel, all were British possessions until shortly after the end of WWII, and all experienced wars within months of England relinquishing soverignty in a hasty manner.

One of the more interesting conversational threads was one I had with the head of anesthiology for one of the major Houston hospitals, in fact, the one where my father had a quadruple bypass a few years back. The guy told me that if I was ever there, to ask for him. I told him that I hoped he didn't take it personally if I told him I hoped I never saw him again. :-) He said he understood.

As an aside, am I the only person to notice that Indian women can be amazingly, wondrously beautiful? In my chequered past, I've had the good fortune to have a fling or three with women of nearly all flavors, but I've never enjoyed the company of an Indian woman. I need to work on that. :-)

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