Road Warrior in Chicago

 

Too much traveling

Mar. 16th, 2005 | 05:10 am

Sitting in an exhausted heap at O'Hare in Chicago. Four hours sleep, coming down with a cold, feeling crumpled. For the first time ever, I'm traveling in sweats. At 4:00 a.m. I was lucky to get up and stagger into a warm up suit and downstairs. It's been a long intense week and my feet hurt, my throat is getting sore and I am beyond tired at this point. The conference went well and I think I avoided getting myself into hot water this year. Last year will live in infamy and become one of those corporate stories.

Last year I went with two raucous women from California schools and one mouse from Oklahoma to the infamous Howl at the Moon which is a dueling piano bar. This means it is way too noisy and smoky and generally great fun. I was drinking martini's with olives stuffed with blue cheese in them--dirty martini's, even worse. Things were fine until about 2:00 am when we rolled out and hit the fresh air. I realized I was beyond drunk and somehow staggered back to the hotel, up the elevator and into the bathroom where I proceeded to puke for four hours until I had to take a shower get dressed and try to get downstairs and present a topic to 100 people who weren't expecting a slightly green drunk person to show up. I lied and told my boss I had food poisoning--like that worked. Somehow I got through the day and then literally passed out in my room for three hours. From here forward I only drink beer at conferences with clients--it's really hard to drink enough beer to get so drunk you puke for four hours. The fact that you have to pee every three minutes usually tips you off to stop taking fluid in. 

That being said, last night I did recover enough to leave my womb-room at the Westin and trot forth into the twenty nine degree night with Juanita from Loma Linda and Pam from Southern Oregon and Juanita's sister Carmen.

We were determined to have some sort of Chicago experience before we went home, Pam had never been in the city before and had been trapped for a whole week inside a hotel. We decided we wanted to ride the El, too many episodes of ER I guess. We fumbled our way into the vestibule of the station and it took a guard and a passenger assistant to help us find our way to an E ticket ride on the El. I'm sure they thought we couldn't navigate our way out of a wet sack, but between the four of us we managed to figure out how to get four tickets from the vending machine, get them inserted right way up after three tries, go down a flight of stairs and get the blue line and get off at the first stop--Washington, go through the tunnel and then take the red train--away from O'Hare and get off downtown at Howard. We managed to get up and down stairs on the trains and emerge just two blocks off Michigan. The Magnificent Mile.

Foot pain had not set in yet so we trotted over to Borders and roamed around for a bit looking for airplane reading--and I found a pink martini CD to listen to--which is excellent by the way. We annoyed the guard on the Water Tower steps and then flocked across the road to Marshall Fields. Emerging from the cold into the perfume laden world of the up scale cosmetics counter I couldn't help but grin to myself at the costumery of the thin white pretenders who were shilling the products. All of them wore a sneer and all black outfits. I really fell in love with the blonde who had on skinny leather pants and Very Interesting shoes. High heeled boots that had elastic tops that her pants tucked into. Very weird and seriously tragically ugly. Found a new foo foo I love too, Thierry Mugler's Angel. Nice smell, I got it on my scarf so I can still smell it.

Upstairs the rubes stared at $98 Coach coin purses and Mahnolo Blahnik shoes sold in a shoe atelier by a gay shoe fetishist. Before we left the store on the second floor which dumped into the Water Tower Place mall, I discovered a sales counter that looked interesting. It was retailing pet stuff. Leashes, coats, collars. $48 on sale? I think not. But, I did find an Italian dog coat that was just too chic. Reflective silver vinyl with little zippered pockets on the back. I suppose you could unzip them and stuff in a whole box of milk bones for your dog to carry resulting in a really lumpy looking dog, or just admire the silver zipper pulls in the shape of bones that are engraved with the word "baby". The coat is made by friends of I can't remember but the label is cool, full color with a picture of a Yorkie or something like on it.

I looked at the tag on the thing and saw it was originally $260.00. Yes, for a DOG coat. It was marked down to $25.97 and had had five intervening markdowns. I peeled off the layers of tags to observe the coats slide from haute couture to bargain basement. I had to have the coat for Nellie. Who could resist a $260 dog coat souvenir? I read the label when we got to the restaurant where we had dinner. The damned coat is lined with cashmere. Yes. Cashmere.

When Nellie finds out she is wearing dog couture will she develop an attitude? Demand nail polish? Massages? Refuse to be seen with ruffians like us? Who knows?