Mother Knows Best

Anytime I need advice on how to stuff a turkey, or the best food to feed Kitty, I call my mom. Although I wouldn't have admitted this while I was a teenager, it turns out mom knows a lot more than I do about a lot of things.

"Hi, what are you doing?" as if I wasn't calling with an ulterior motive.

"I'm having dinner at the Outback with your uncle."

"UNCLE BILL!" I screamed into her ear.

Uncle Bill is my dad's brother, and one of my favorite people in the whole world. The Outback is a steakhouse with an Australian gimmick, and everytime he comes through town, we have dinner there. We have the same sense of humor, and our conversations often border on the absurd. He does a fantastic impression of the Swedish chef.

Turns out, I had a brief fling with the former manager of the Outback last January, during an extended stay back home. I asked about their waiter.

"He's a young kid, very good-looking."

Then I overheard my uncle add "and very glib!"

Well, there can't be too many good-looking, glib waiters who work at that particular Outback, so I told them to look at the bill to find his name. Sure enough, it was the Chicken Shit himself.

(I should mention, Chicken Shit earned his moniker by breaking up with me by text message, very much like Berger broke up with Carrie on a Post-It note in an episode of Sex and the City, in the hope of "avoiding a scene." Please note, that text messages can be forwarded en masse, very much like an email, to all of her girlfriends, as well as her friends' friends, and this is probably not the kind of reputation you want to earn in a small town with very slim pickins when it comes to eligible bachlorettes that a good-looking, and glib, waiter would actually want to date.)

This is the type of situation that is an perfect example of what I call poetic justice.

"Does Uncle Bill know the story?" I asked mom. Mom and I are close, so she had been privy to the sordid details of the surmise of our brief relationship.

"No, but why don't you tell him," she said, handing Uncle Bill the phone.

"How's my favorite uncle? So, how was the service tonight?"

"Well, just fine, but I've been giving him a hard time."

"Do you want to give him a really hard time? I dated him last year, you know."

Silence. Then a timid, "Hello?"

OH SHIT. They put him on the phone. OK, I figured, it's best to just go along with it, and then kill my family later.

"Do you know who this is?"

"Uhhhhhh, no."

"It's the Swedish girl."

"Uhhhhhh, ummmmm, hi. How...um....are you?"

"I'm good. I'm in Sweden right now. Guess you just waited on my mom and my uncle, and I called at just the right time."

"Oh, your mom...." His voice trailed off. He had never met her while we were seeing each other, even though she had waved to him several times from the front door when he came by to pick me up.

Now, unfortunately, I didn't have the pleasure of seeing the expression on his face, but I got enough of a buzz off the account my mother gave me later. But his "eyes got really wide," all the while my mother was sitting there, grinning like an idiot. (This is one of those situations where he knew that he had handled the situation very badly, so there was nothing left to do but be embarassed when reminded of his actions.)

"Ummm, I think your uncle wants to talk to you again. Ummm, bye."

Mom is laughing hysterically in the background. "Uncle Bill, I can't believe you put him on the phone," I admonished. "This whole situation is just bizarre."

"What? I can't hear you."

That man is always pretending to be hard of hearing. To the others (being my mom and Chicken Shit), he announced, "I think she said, 'I'm taking off my braissere.'"

At which point, Mom's laughter becomes uncontrollable.

"I think we'd better end this call now," I said. "It's getting out of hand."

Tsk. Tsk.

Thank God!!! there is a whole ocean seperating me from this family fiasco. I swear to God, I'll never, ever do things like that to embarrass my children.

But at least the Chicken Shit was scared shitless, during a brief moment of sweet, poetic justice.