Episode 32: How to Not Vomit

Many years ago, my friends Andy and Suzy and Frank were invited to a masquerade ball one Halloween. While they were all getting ready, they decided to have a few cups of a homemade punch called Gitchee Gloomee, which was made up of little bits of this and that left over from various parties at Suzy's: Galliano, Pernod, Rum, Apple Schnapps, Bailey's; you know...the things you never know just what to do with. Several cups of this concoction later and they were, as the French say, in their cups.

Late for the party, they jumped into the car and hurried. Andy was the driver (this was back when drunk driving was a legitimate sport) and he was dressed in a traditional skeleton costume. Frank was in the backseat, dressed as Al Capone. In the passenger seat was Suzy, dressed as the Blessed Virgin Mary, right down to a realistically swaddled fake baby. As they zipped drunkenly in and out of traffic down West End Avenue, the Blessed Virgin Mary started to feel a little, uh, less Blessed. She demanded that the skeleton/chauffeur stop the Tercel and just as he did, the Mother of Christ threw the car door open, the Christ child fell into the gutter and the Blessed Virgin Mary threw a quart of neon green Gitchee Gloomee up all over him...right in front of the giant plate glass window of the original Houston's Restaurant. She lifted the blue edge of her headdress and wiped her mouth, looked up at the three dozen forks-frozen-in-place onlookers on the other side of the glass and waved at them as if she had just left a blessing behind and having witnessed this display, they would all now be cured of whatever ailed them. Which, since it was Houston's, was probably a lot of ailing.

Then she sat back upright and closed the door and a skeleton, Al Capone and the Blessed Mother drove off into the night, leaving a vomit-covered Baby Jesus abandoned by the side of the road. And if that's not a useful religious allegory, I don't know what is.