Boston Tea Party 2009 Update #2
The elevators are possessed! You will get stuck! That is a promise not a prediction. Amy Danziger has been stuck every year! Last year she said THAT’S IT! No more elevators! From now on: only stairs!
So she got stuck in the stairwell. Running up and down floors screaming HELLO CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME banging on access doors till someone let her in. So she could take the elevator back to her room. Management said yes that’s right, we lock the doors in the stairwell. Fire safety.
The great breakfast buffet? I take it all back. This morning a katrillion-giga-faskillion water-logged 13-year-olds came screaming through the room, coughing and climbing over the “buffet” table. Their glaze-eyed zombified parents were hacking and sneezing too (it’s cold and raining) but at least they were blowing their noses into their breakfast napkins not wiping it on the backs of their hands.
My memory of the buffet is stuck in 2006 when there actually was a buffet. I forgot the additional 20 tables crammed into the room, the “buffet” moved to a dinner table in the back corner. You say Excuse me! Excuse me! weaving through the dining room to find nothing but squashed boxes of Special-K, frozen bagels (every single kid picked up every single bagel to squeeze for their friends yelling hahahaha! Feel em! They’re FROZEN! hahahaha!) also one half-peeled banana, one banana squeezed until it turned to liquid, one black banana, and one bowl of lukewarm oatmeal-water.
The nice hostess who’s been here since the original Tea Party in 1773 said with the serenity that only age can give, in thick Boston-ese, “Mehh-nagement made the buffet smallah. We nevah know why they doo the things they doo.” Only other dancers in the place were Steve and Rebecca themselves, sitting so politely at the front, waiting a full hour for two pancakes and a pot of coffee. “Any idea what’s going on here?” they whispered to us as we left, hungrier than before we got there. “Is there a school vacation or something?”
The floor is Bill’s – same brand new floor we danced on last week in Chicago where it was used for the first time (it was slow, as I mentioned.) It felt fine last night. Bill explained that the more it’s used the better it gets. Steve and Rebecca say Bill put sawdust down last night, which helps a lot. Sawdust! I forgot about good ole’ fashioned sawdust. We used to have dances in actual barns where heaps of sawdust would be thrown down.
Strictlys at 9 tonight – west coast, Lindy, Balboa, and the Invitational.
Hurricane season! Kyle and Sarah got stuck in Dallas last night. Hope they’ll make it out! Many flights cancelled yesterday (including up and down the east coast) because of storms. Bunch of pros coming in to Logan this afternoon – hope they make it! And my Genieboy! Hope he makes it!