#4 -- Pansy Walks Into A Bar...

Well, actually this time it was a winery. Several wineries. Okay...LOTS of wineries. It was the usual gang of suspects: Stupid Elderly Baby Sister (SEBS), SEBS's Hubby, Mr. Pansy and me. We are touring the wineries of Napa/Sonoma/wherever the fuck that part of California is where all the hip, young, suave, heads-up-their-asses sophisticates go to swirl wine, sniff it and taste it. Well, we know WE got all that going on, especially the heads-up-our-asses part so we are there!

Now, this actually WAS in the "good ole days" when the wineries would fucking seriously fill up the wine glasses to the absolute top of some majorly big-ass glasses...which large glasses they supplied for Free. Not like nowadays where the cheap bastards have a pour-governor on the bottles and you have to pay serious bucks for the "real" wine glasses.

Of course, us four Turnip Truck Escapees know squat about wine but we are all over the age of 21, it's a glorious California day, and we are Carooozin' in the SEBSmobile: a 1954 convertible Chevrolet Bel Air in Robin's Egg Blue. As is the usual case when SEBS and Pansy are in a convertible car of any kind, we are looking totally hot with our naturally red hair flying in the wind. And we are with our fine looking men: SEBS' hubby is a fucking dead-on ringer for Bill Walsh. Which resemblance really screws him on the bar scene since nowadays Bill Walsh is in actual fucking fact dead! Mr. Pansy is a really fucking dead-on ringer for Jack Cassady of the Jefferson Airplane. Pansy has to bite her tongue all the damn time to keep from calling out "Jack" when with Mr. Pansy in the biblical way. And don't go getting all snorky about antique, out-of-touch Pansy. She knows the band has changed its name several times to stupid things like Starship in their pathetic attempt to still snag the youth market even though most of them are Really Old. They change their stupid band name more often than Pansy changes her Pomeranian's name! Pansy bets some of them, if not most, are, like, in their 50s for god's sake.

We stop at winery #1. "Taste" several glasses apiece of wine. On to the next winery, taste. Taste, Repeat, Taste More. We have no idea how many wineries we have been to but eventually come to the realization we are going to have to sober up to get home. We stay at the last winery to eat our picnic lunch. Some kind of mayonnaise-laden tuna or chicken sandwiches that have been warming in the trunk all day long.

We four are walking/stumbling to the car when suddenly (cue dramatic music with danger noises) Mr. Pansy sees the most horrible sight on earth. He is, really, practically in tears over what he sees and yells (which yelling is in and of itself very alarming because in the dictionary beside the word "extremely quiet" is a picture of Mr. Pansy) in his very deep voice but now laden with undertones of horror and a bit of fright: "Oh. My. God! There is a....DOVE stuck in the fence there!"

And it is!! There is a cyclone fence and this poor dove is struggling and struggling and then it would rest limply for awhile before it began its struggles anew. We all freak out. Mr. Pansy, acting as Point Man, leads the four of us very, very tentatively, in single file, toward the poor dove. We are all in a half-crouch because we don't want to startle the dove, you know. And most of us are weeping by now but there is no way out of this rescue/possibly suicidal mission. We have seen the bird so now we have the reponsibility to rescue the dove. Dammit.

We would creep forward a few feet, stop to take deep breaths, and then proceed forward again. Suddenly(!) Mr. Pansy stands straight up and yells in his very deep Charlton Heston-as-God voice: "WAIT! It is NOT a dove." [he squints real hard] "It is a....pigeon!" We hold a strategy meeting and as a group decide that even a pigeon does not deserve to suffer like that. So we crouch down again and continue sneaking up on to the bird who is still struggling and then going completely limp. We are very worried it may not make it before we can save it.

We look around for sticks, cloths, anything to help us hold the pigeon when we get there. Now we are about 30 feet from the bird. We think it has seen us (ya think? It certainly had fucking HEARD us by now.) because it gets very still. Maybe it is just tired but it is still slightly moving. Now we are 20 feet away.....10 feet away...5 feet away. FIVE FUCKING FEET AWAY FROM THE FUCKING TRAPPED BIRD BEFORE WE FUCKING FIGURE OUT IT IS A FUCKING GRAY FUCKING RAG FUCKING TIED TO THE FUCKING CYCLONE FUCKING FENCE.

Now, I am not certain but I do believe the warm mayonnaise sandwiches may have contributed to our states of mind. It couldn't have been the approximate 1 gallon of wine each of us had consumed up to that point in time? On empty stomachs? Naaah. You would think someone would have warned us about how stupid that fucking, goddam..msx#ixv%yhu^@!ep)+?fpppfffgg#t&tt! wine tasting can make you.

Oh, and the weather? A balmy, very light breeze day with occasional gusts to 10mph.