Pink Martini, Part I

With our house in ruins and no end in sight, I decided it was a fine time for an adventure.

It all began with a simple plan: Jess and I would go see Pink Martini, the band/small orchestra whose musical style belongs on a menu: lounge marinated in world, infused with jazz, garnished with classical, then served with a dollop of theater. Without being intrusive or overly stimulating, Pink Martini wets your appetite, sends you to an exotic yet familiar place, and invites you to sink down and sip on something both potent and entirely silly...like a pink martini, for example.

Giddy with the idea that our town, the beautiful San Diego, is the kind of place that attracts acts like Pink Martini on so frivolous a night as a Tuesday, we decided we wanted to go...

...but not for the $45 ticket price.

(You see, though there is truth to the words of my crazy neighbor Tony - "Beans and rice are good for you" - I didn't think I ought to condemn us to those two culinary choices by further squandering our money on random entertainment during this massive renovation.)

All was not lost, however. Jess, who is never short on fabulous ideas, decided that we would simply get a BOAT! (she declared triumphantly) and pull up close to Humphrey's, which is on the water, and enjoy the music for free from our own little vessel.

Perfect.

(As you may recall, Jess is my friend with the sail boat, the one who took us for a sunset cruise weeks ago. This sailboat is located in Mission Bay ("1" at the top of the map) whereas Humphrey's is in San Diego Bay (red star at the bottom of the map.) To take her boat, we would have had to have sailed it a considerable distance and in the open ocean. Since this concert was after work, we opted for finding a new boat. Again, Jess was full of ideas.)

"A dinghy!" she cried.

"Great!" I replied.

(And so it was decided.)

Jess called upon one of her 5 million friends for a loaner dinghy. After work, we met the dinghy owner Gary, a guy she races sailboats with (yes, Jess is a badass, if you haven't gleaned that yet), at the "Dinghy Doctor," where his vessel had been "patched up." We waited a long time for the Dinghy MDs to return from their dinner break and discharge our inflatable boat. I used that opportunity to head to a little Mexican place down the road to pick up our dinner - it was there that I finally learned that "menudo," which appears on every Mexican menu, is actually tripe stew (note to self: no menudo for me). Finally, we got the dinghy and loaded it up in Jess' Audi wagon, and I followed her in my car as we searched for a suitable spot to launch.

For reasons unclear to me even now (but that I suspect had something to do with the fact that we were trespassing), Jess decided the best spot would be to launch - not off of the pier - but off of the dirt and rocks to the left of the pier at the yacht club.

Our first task: inflating the dinghy.

This task was accomplished manually (or pedally) by pumping an accordion-like air pump with the foot. Perhaps because Fate considered this to be too straightforward for the kind of evening we were about to have, it turned out that the air valve on her pump was broken, so it had to be covered while pumping out then uncovered to allow air to refill the chamber. The bottom line is this: while one person (me) stomped on the pump a la hee-haw, the other person (Jess) had to coordinate perfectly with the covering and uncovering of the hole. It was vaguely like CPR at the Opry.

Several people passed us during this ridiculous endeavor and asked us what we were up to. We jokingly replied "We're fleeing the country to Cuba." They smiled politely if skeptically. It wasn't long before our little boat was seaworthy (or so we thought).

Getting it to the water wasn't so easy - Jess had chosen a spot where the earth fell off steeply and rocks jutted out here and there. We lifted the dinghy overhead. I went first, half sliding down the slope. We decided to let the dinghy sort of shimmy down the embankment. She followed, and we eased it into the water. Jess hopped in. Since night had fallen and no one was around, and we had several hours of beer drinking on the boat ahead of us, I decided to slink off very unceremoniously to pee on a rock. (This pretty much galvanized our friendship.) When I returned, I could tell something was wrong, though. "Isabel, I'm pretty concerned. There's a leak." "Oh?" I asked. "Yeah, an air leak. Not a little one. A massive one. Like a whooooooooosh." "That so?" "Uh huh. And a water leak. Water rushing in." "I see." I couldn't really add anything more. "But here's the deal," continued Jess, who gives the reassuring impression that she's MacGyver's female counterpart, "I really want to go to the concert, and what's the worse that could happen? I mean, we'll have to bail water and pump up the boat every so often." She paused, and we were silent. Suddenly, she declared "I say, let's do it!!" Without a second thought, I agreed and hopped into the vessel, only to hear the sound of air escaping rapidly through a large gash.