Party 'Til the Cows Go Home
I must have heard of it on television, way back when: something called the “Come As You Are” party. The concept intrigued me no end.
I marveled to think that, at any given, mundane moment -- and most of them were -- the phone might ring. “Come as you are!” mischievous strangers with time on their hands would shout. And my sole and sudden social obligation would be to instantly drop whatever I was doing (oh please, oh please) and hasten myself -- as I was -- to a party.
This singular hope got me through years of household chores, homework and my father’s interminable football games on TV. But that wasn’t even the best part.
As I envisioned it, being invited to a Come As You Are party meant you weren’t allowed to alter your appearance in any way before making your entrance -- not so much as a quick comb through the hair. That was, in fact, the whole point of the Come As You Are party -- to catch you in some state of embarrassing dishevelment. Bravery, thus -- when the moment arrived -- would be key.
If you couldn’t hack it -- showing up, say, with curlers in your hair, shaving cream on your face -- to play fair, you had to decline the invitation, which would then cause intense partywide speculation over how bad you must truly have looked not to have come. And showing up spiffy, with every hair suspiciously in place -- “Ah, gee, I was heading out to another party when you called ... ” -- would mean being subjected to questioning for as long as it took until you cracked and confessed. “All right, all right! I was in a faded housedress!” And bunny slippers? they’d press. “And bunny slippers!”
And then you could stay -- but really, at what cost?
These thoughts consumed me.
Picture, if you will, my mother, circa 1963. Turquoise top, auburn updo. Talking on her turquoise telephone, its 20-foot cord giving her full run of her turquoise kitchen. Perpetual Pall Mall in hand and damn the consequences.
I pop into the scene, dripping, wearing a bath towel.
“Mom!”
Nothing.
“Mom!”
Stony pause.
“What?”
“What if I got invited to a Come As You Are party RIGHT NOW?”
“What?”
“I mean, would it be cheating to put on my robe? Would they really expect me to go like THIS?” By this time I was already fretting about being handed a drink and dropping my towel.
“Can’t you see I’m on the phone?”
Calculating pause.
“Oh. Yeah, right. They’d get a busy signal anyway ...” And off I go, temporarily safe from potential embarrassment.
(I was always a literal child, and my long-suffering mother was the source of all my knowledge in my pre-library card, way-pre-Internet years. She was -- I’m sorry to say -- often useless regarding the finer points of my inquiry ...
“Mom, you know when people say ‘thanks for nothing’?”
“What?”
“You know, is it ‘Thanks for nothing!’ [in singsong voice] or ‘Thanks for NOTHING’ [glum, accusing voice]. Does it mean somebody’s thanking you for no reason, just because you’re you, or are they being mean?”
Forget Al Gore, I think the Internet was really created by my mother. Whipped up spontaneously in the kitchen, just one of many offhand miracles of that particular day.
“There. That oughta answer your question,” she’d say, lighting another Pall Mall and turning back to the telephone. “Now go and bring the laundry up, will you?”)
But back to the party ... because this time, you’re invited.
What are you wearing?
I just hope it’s not red, because the cows are coming. Well, actually they left this morning, but they’ll be back.
Now my mother never did adequately resolve the question of whether a bull would really get mad and kill you if he saw you wearing red. (Who tells children these things?) Anyway I always imagined myself uniquely able to convey to said charging beast that it was an accident, a mere accessory, that the crimson-hating creature would, in the nick of time, spare me. Perhaps, assuming I vowed not to repeat the mistake, we’d even become friends ...
And that’s kind of what happened.
Picture, if you will, a former girl, one whose thousands of imagined invitations to exciting, spontaneous Come As You Are parties never came (well, my mom WAS on the phone a lot ...). Would said former girl settle for exciting, spontaneous Cow As You Are parties?
You bet she would.
I marveled to think that, at any given, mundane moment -- and most of them were -- the phone might ring. “Come as you are!” mischievous strangers with time on their hands would shout. And my sole and sudden social obligation would be to instantly drop whatever I was doing (oh please, oh please) and hasten myself -- as I was -- to a party.
This singular hope got me through years of household chores, homework and my father’s interminable football games on TV. But that wasn’t even the best part.
As I envisioned it, being invited to a Come As You Are party meant you weren’t allowed to alter your appearance in any way before making your entrance -- not so much as a quick comb through the hair. That was, in fact, the whole point of the Come As You Are party -- to catch you in some state of embarrassing dishevelment. Bravery, thus -- when the moment arrived -- would be key.
If you couldn’t hack it -- showing up, say, with curlers in your hair, shaving cream on your face -- to play fair, you had to decline the invitation, which would then cause intense partywide speculation over how bad you must truly have looked not to have come. And showing up spiffy, with every hair suspiciously in place -- “Ah, gee, I was heading out to another party when you called ... ” -- would mean being subjected to questioning for as long as it took until you cracked and confessed. “All right, all right! I was in a faded housedress!” And bunny slippers? they’d press. “And bunny slippers!”
And then you could stay -- but really, at what cost?
These thoughts consumed me.
Picture, if you will, my mother, circa 1963. Turquoise top, auburn updo. Talking on her turquoise telephone, its 20-foot cord giving her full run of her turquoise kitchen. Perpetual Pall Mall in hand and damn the consequences.
I pop into the scene, dripping, wearing a bath towel.
“Mom!”
Nothing.
“Mom!”
Stony pause.
“What?”
“What if I got invited to a Come As You Are party RIGHT NOW?”
“What?”
“I mean, would it be cheating to put on my robe? Would they really expect me to go like THIS?” By this time I was already fretting about being handed a drink and dropping my towel.
“Can’t you see I’m on the phone?”
Calculating pause.
“Oh. Yeah, right. They’d get a busy signal anyway ...” And off I go, temporarily safe from potential embarrassment.
(I was always a literal child, and my long-suffering mother was the source of all my knowledge in my pre-library card, way-pre-Internet years. She was -- I’m sorry to say -- often useless regarding the finer points of my inquiry ...
“Mom, you know when people say ‘thanks for nothing’?”
“What?”
“You know, is it ‘Thanks for nothing!’ [in singsong voice] or ‘Thanks for NOTHING’ [glum, accusing voice]. Does it mean somebody’s thanking you for no reason, just because you’re you, or are they being mean?”
Forget Al Gore, I think the Internet was really created by my mother. Whipped up spontaneously in the kitchen, just one of many offhand miracles of that particular day.
“There. That oughta answer your question,” she’d say, lighting another Pall Mall and turning back to the telephone. “Now go and bring the laundry up, will you?”)
But back to the party ... because this time, you’re invited.
What are you wearing?
I just hope it’s not red, because the cows are coming. Well, actually they left this morning, but they’ll be back.
Now my mother never did adequately resolve the question of whether a bull would really get mad and kill you if he saw you wearing red. (Who tells children these things?) Anyway I always imagined myself uniquely able to convey to said charging beast that it was an accident, a mere accessory, that the crimson-hating creature would, in the nick of time, spare me. Perhaps, assuming I vowed not to repeat the mistake, we’d even become friends ...
And that’s kind of what happened.
Picture, if you will, a former girl, one whose thousands of imagined invitations to exciting, spontaneous Come As You Are parties never came (well, my mom WAS on the phone a lot ...). Would said former girl settle for exciting, spontaneous Cow As You Are parties?
You bet she would.
We Herd. There's a Party?
What chance would a harried farmer neighbor with chronically bad fencing have then?
At six this Sunday morning came the now-familiar call. Not by telephone, but by bellow.
All ready, no red, I see them from my window, the small herd of recent escapees gathering steam on the hill in my neighbors’ yard, then -- suddenly -- hightailing it down our dead-end road, past my house and toward the corner. In practiced moves, I leap out of bed and run downstairs, taking just enough time for a quick call (speed dial: COWS) before going after them.
“YOO-hoo!” I shout flirtatiously once out on the road, getting their attention from 100 feet away. “YOO-hoo!” I shake the grain bag that I’d grabbed on the way enticingly. The herd stares at me and seems to discuss it, then starts back toward the relative safety of my yard. Making exaggerated moves, I let them see me pour out small piles of grain, sealing the invitation. (I’ll never understand why my other neighbors don’t get the hang of this ...)
Now when the farmer finally gets his phone message and makes his eventual way down, I’ll try to match his seriousness (which seems to me put on, a defensive front, given this longtime, randomly recurring event).
But what I’m really thinking all the while is: Party time, at last.
And while the herd -- three cows, one bull and a small calf this time -- starts in on the hors d’oeurves, I rush to bring out the main course, spreading a few flakes of hay onto my unmown lawn. Let’s get this party started!
I spend the next hour or so leaning on my car, watching the cows eat, watching them watch me. I take pictures, and video, and reassure them they look gorgeous. I ignore my dogs, protesting from the house that I’ve violated our policy that they inspect and approve all visitors.
Variously the cows come close and sniff me, puzzling, then back away in full reverse. Only the calf stays back, making brief stabs at nursing as the shifting opportunity arises.
Finally a four-wheeler’s roar announces the farmer’s arrival. By then I’ve got his herd grazing behind my own fence, temporarily secure. I’ve also got a cow ... patty, is it? ... in my garage, but I don’t let on; I could have prevented it if I’d wanted to spoil the mood.
As usual, the farmer’s unhappy to see me, even with his herd safe and sound and no one freaking or calling the cops. He ignores the fact that the cows didn’t come here, I got them here. On their own, they would have headed for parts unknown. I answer back what everybody around here knows: “It’s your fence, dude.”
Anyway it’s not like I keep grain and hay around in order to tempt cows my way unnecessarily. My own small herd -- of four alpacas -- is in plain evidence the whole time, staring from the doorway of their little barn in apparent wonderment. (“Isn’t that OUR grain?”)
Hmph, I think, after he’s shamed his beauties toward home, right: my abject apologies for doing the only thing that kept those cows off the roads and where he could find them. Is it really so bad that I should have enjoyed it?
Then I shift my focus back to the cows themselves, how sweet they are, how well-behaved. I try to push to the back of my mind how it’s never the same herd twice, how today’s bull might only have been here before as a calf, and where the others have gone. I tell myself I’m glad they had at least one morning of freedom, one party, before they went.
(Come to think of it, the sweatshirt I grabbed in my rush out the door this morning WAS red. While the bull hadn’t seemed to notice, maybe that’s what made the farmer so mad?)
At six this Sunday morning came the now-familiar call. Not by telephone, but by bellow.
All ready, no red, I see them from my window, the small herd of recent escapees gathering steam on the hill in my neighbors’ yard, then -- suddenly -- hightailing it down our dead-end road, past my house and toward the corner. In practiced moves, I leap out of bed and run downstairs, taking just enough time for a quick call (speed dial: COWS) before going after them.
“YOO-hoo!” I shout flirtatiously once out on the road, getting their attention from 100 feet away. “YOO-hoo!” I shake the grain bag that I’d grabbed on the way enticingly. The herd stares at me and seems to discuss it, then starts back toward the relative safety of my yard. Making exaggerated moves, I let them see me pour out small piles of grain, sealing the invitation. (I’ll never understand why my other neighbors don’t get the hang of this ...)
Now when the farmer finally gets his phone message and makes his eventual way down, I’ll try to match his seriousness (which seems to me put on, a defensive front, given this longtime, randomly recurring event).
But what I’m really thinking all the while is: Party time, at last.
And while the herd -- three cows, one bull and a small calf this time -- starts in on the hors d’oeurves, I rush to bring out the main course, spreading a few flakes of hay onto my unmown lawn. Let’s get this party started!
I spend the next hour or so leaning on my car, watching the cows eat, watching them watch me. I take pictures, and video, and reassure them they look gorgeous. I ignore my dogs, protesting from the house that I’ve violated our policy that they inspect and approve all visitors.
Variously the cows come close and sniff me, puzzling, then back away in full reverse. Only the calf stays back, making brief stabs at nursing as the shifting opportunity arises.
Finally a four-wheeler’s roar announces the farmer’s arrival. By then I’ve got his herd grazing behind my own fence, temporarily secure. I’ve also got a cow ... patty, is it? ... in my garage, but I don’t let on; I could have prevented it if I’d wanted to spoil the mood.
As usual, the farmer’s unhappy to see me, even with his herd safe and sound and no one freaking or calling the cops. He ignores the fact that the cows didn’t come here, I got them here. On their own, they would have headed for parts unknown. I answer back what everybody around here knows: “It’s your fence, dude.”
Anyway it’s not like I keep grain and hay around in order to tempt cows my way unnecessarily. My own small herd -- of four alpacas -- is in plain evidence the whole time, staring from the doorway of their little barn in apparent wonderment. (“Isn’t that OUR grain?”)
Hmph, I think, after he’s shamed his beauties toward home, right: my abject apologies for doing the only thing that kept those cows off the roads and where he could find them. Is it really so bad that I should have enjoyed it?
Then I shift my focus back to the cows themselves, how sweet they are, how well-behaved. I try to push to the back of my mind how it’s never the same herd twice, how today’s bull might only have been here before as a calf, and where the others have gone. I tell myself I’m glad they had at least one morning of freedom, one party, before they went.
(Come to think of it, the sweatshirt I grabbed in my rush out the door this morning WAS red. While the bull hadn’t seemed to notice, maybe that’s what made the farmer so mad?)
