Lesson One:
Don’t Talk to Strangers
by Kate Zimmerman for the North Shore News

In life, there are friends with whom you have peaceful and pleasant times, and there are friends with whom you have weird and woolly times. My friend Peggy is one of the latter.

Whenever I see her, something silly occurs, whether we come up with a ludicrous idea for a screenplay about a Scotsman imprisoned inside Richmond’s Aberdeen Mall or find ourselves flirting with Buddhism just because we like a temple’s vegan dumplings.

Peggy is a restaurant reviewer, and recently she took me to the new restaurant, Lift. It overlooks Coal Harbour and is swankety-swank. The wait-staff knew who she was and hovered about, chatting. At one point I extricated myself from an in-depth discussion of stem-less wineglasses and headed for the stairs up to the ladies’ loo.

As I approached them, a heavy-set blonde woman, 30-ish, was descending. There was plenty of room for her to pass me without contact. She chose to approach me, rub her considerable bosom up and down against mine while staring in another direction, and then, without a word, return to her seat at the bar.

Needless to say, this was startling.  When I returned to my own spot I told this tale to Peggy and the Lift staff member at our table, and discovered that this woman was a “regular.” We sent her a drink from an anonymous admirer and reeled out of the restaurant, giggling. That’s a typically atypical night with Peggy.

Last week I once again hooked up with her. We had been invited to an event downtown. Afterward, Peggy (50) and her friend Chantelle (40) and I (priceless) decided to go for a drink at Diva at the Met. Peggy and Chantelle were spinning yarns about celebrities they had met. Suddenly, I noticed that they were glancing repeatedly at the bar.

“What’s with that guy?” Peggy asked.

I looked over to where a man of about 35 was sitting. He was a striking fellow, with a long dark ponytail, wearing a leather jacket, perched on a stool. “He looks film-y,” I said.

“Yes, but what’s with him?” asked Peggy.

“Yeah, he keeps going in and out of the restaurant, in and out, in and out,” said Chantelle.

“He just went over and gave the hostess some money or something, and now he’s back at the bar,” said Peggy. “What’s he doing? It’s driving me nuts!”

Chantelle agreed that this complete stranger was behaving in an infuriating fashion. So the two of them waved the man over to our table.

“What are you doing?” asked Peggy. “You keep going in and out of the restaurant. What’s going on?”

“Going for a smoke,” said the man politely.

“What are you doing here, generally?” asked Chantelle.

“I’m filming in town,” said the man. The women asked him to sit down with us. It turned out that he was acting in the sequel to a movie featuring an A-list Hollywood star. His character had been killed off in an action thriller and he was here doing flashback scenes and teaching the lead how to handle weapons.

“How do you know how to do that?” one of us asked.

“I used to be in the U.S. army, Special Forces,” said the man, who had one of those handsome, firm-jawed faces you’re always seeing above fatigues on TV.

That’s when Peggy -- who, now that I noticed, looked half-tanked -- blew up like a stick of dynamite. “U.S. army!!” she snarled, with a savage scowl. “What kind of a @#$% idiot joins the U.S. army? What, did you vote for that @#$%& Bush? What are you, a @#$%& moron?”

I stared at her, aghast. The actor answered calmly that he never discussed religion or politics, because there were extreme views on either side, and he preferred to stay somewhere in the middle.

“@#$%& that, you dick,” said Peggy, sputtering away about Americans and what testosterone-fuelled, murderous blockheads they were.

The man proceeded to tell us about how he had worked for the army in El Salvador and how people would be surprised by how much humanitarian work the U.S. army does. This set Peggy off into a veritable Dominion Day of verbal fireworks. He continued to ignore her outbursts while I attempted to overdose on free peanuts.

Meanwhile, Chantelle decided to pursue her own agenda. It seemed that a friend of hers had sent a script to one of the stars of this film and that if this luminary would only give the screenplay the go-ahead, her friend’s career would soar into the stratosphere. “Mind you,” Chantelle said to Mr. Special Forces, “I’ve said nothing. Please, please, please don’t repeat what I’ve just told you.”

Our guest said he wouldn’t, but the vaguely hammered Chantelle persisted on the topic of the utmost secrecy of this endeavor of her friend’s. As Peggy cursed and grimaced at the comely actor like a drunken pirate, lacking only a filthy eye-patch and a hook for a hand, I stepped into the fray with a wholesome, grandmotherly “And how do you like Vancouver?”

What a bunch of stooges. The actor, however, was handling us with finesse. Peggy was now listing to one side like a sinking battleship while hurling fermented epithets across the table. (I couldn’t help but think that this might be why she was single.)

Finally, when it seemed clear that she was about to smash her balloon glass and use its largest shard to pierce his jugular, I suggested that we ought to get going. Chantelle and I said our goodbyes, Chantelle still insisting on the actor’s obligation to keep her totally unintelligible secret. Peggy was struggling into her coat. We decided to wait for her outside, where, like true friends, we gossiped savagely about her appalling behaviour.

“I can’t believe how terrible Peggy was to that actor! That was, like, unforgivable!” I said.

“I know,” said Chantelle. “You know, earlier this week at her party, there was this man who actually really liked Peggy and she was just the same. She wasn’t just mean, she was double mean!”

“I think this time she was at least triple mean, maybe even quadruple,” I said sagely.

Peggy was taking an awfully long time getting outside, which was worrying. We didn’t want to be accessories to a grisly murder in Diva at the Met — I wouldn’t have put it past Peggy to stone the actor to death with Brazil nuts. So we went back into the restaurant, where they appeared to be bidding each other a reasonably civil adieu.

Then Peggy tottered towards us.

“That guy just asked me on a date,” she reported cheerfully. “He said he wants to take me out for dinner and then …. (I’ll leave it to your imagination, gentle family newspaper reader.) He said he noticed how ‘hot’ I was right away when I came into the bar. We necked a little.”

Chantelle and I stared at Peggy, mouths agape.

“Yeah, you know, the minute I saw that guy I thought ‘He’s totally my type,’” said Peggy.

Writing > Humour