10:00 AM – I awake to sunshine. Bright, burning, yellow globe of flame, I salute you! (I am from an area of the country that sees little of this, so please forgive the sun salutation.)
During the night, I’ve decided to dedicate my day to the uninspirational.
I wander down the street from the hotel to find a coffee company I read about, Bad Ass Coffee Company. This sounds sort of uninspiring to me. I mean, who wants to be physically threatened while drinking coffee?
As I wander I notice a misplaced and upside-down building. Yes, I said upside-down. Oh, strange, upside-down building I know just how you feel.
Then I look to my left. What is this? A little inspirational moment hits me, like a ray of light admist a tumultuous storm. There it is, Richard Petty’s car #43, hanging above the door of a restaurant. It is the Race Rock Restaurant.
You see my brother, who is 8 years older than me, had the coolest slot car track. He would build these incredible tracks and we’d race on them. The best car, the car everyone wanted but my brother always got dibbs on because it was his track, was the Richard Petty #43. I’m talking about the #43 from the 70′s. (The second most popular car was the “Green Hornet” which my brother built. My Mom always picked the purple #2 car, because she said #2 was her favorite number. I always picked the Rolls Royce. Even back then, I was high maintenance.) My brother and I watched Richard Petty race all the time, and then we aspired to be him on the slot track. Those were great days. I can still remember how the electric guns to the track would start to smell after everything heated up. I love that smell. Thanks Richard Petty, for reminding of me what is important – fun, family, and friends. As life speeds by, I shouldn’t lose sight of those things because of a job!
10:45 I find the Bad Ass coffee company and low and behold, there is noone here to physically threaten me. By Ass, they mean Donkey! How cute!
12:30 I wander around drinking my coffee for awhile, looking at stuff, and decide I’m hungry. I just happen to pass by a restaurant called Tu Tu Tango. I’ve read about this restaurant and am also pretty sure that Amry (a friend who lost her head in the company Decapitation Day) told me about this place. I duck in and realize that it is the perfect place for an uninspired lunch. It bills itself as the home of the starving artist and is decorated by all kinds of local art that is also for sale. In fact, there is a woman there painting, just for our viewing pleasure, while we sip Sangria and munch on tapas. I find this very uninspiring, because I’m sure she didn’t become an artist hoping to finally reach the pinnacle of her career as a human exhibit in a restaurant. Her art is good, though, and I hope her career does climax, perhaps when a wealthy German (*see note below) benefactor falls in love with her works. I order Sangria (delicious) and this fantastic wood fire roasted pear tapas dish, that is sweet, salty, sour, crunchy, and soft all at once. Have I died? Am I in heaven? Nope…just Orlando.
1:30 I head back to the hotel to iChat with Hubby and then take a swim. I tell Hubby that I am going to swim and he tells me to be careful. I write back and say I’m a good swimmer. He writes back and says “Yes, but you haven’t swam for years and are seriously out of shape, and you are all I have!!!” Then he reminds me not to get my wallet stolen while I swim. I haven’t decided yet if this exchange was really sweet or if I should be offended.
5:00 My out-of-shape body and wallet survive the swim and I now have a mind to visit a dueling piano bar I saw while I was wandering around. This is the Howl at the Moon Piano Bar. Now, I’ve never been to a dueling piano show before. I have always wanted to, but I am pretty sure my expectations have been set too high by Donald Duck vs. Daffy Duck in Roger Rabbit. I also consider this to be an uninspired destination, because while I’m sure it is a fun job, I kind of doubt it is the end goal for these musicians. I sit down at the bar and get a rum and diet coke and decide to request a song. I request “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones. In a sudden touch of self pity/self-depricating humor, I dedicate the song to myself because I was fired on Monday and am now here on Friday clear across the country – on a vacation! Two rum and cokes later they get to my song. They call me to the stage!!! They say “Now we usually only do this for birthdays, but tonight we’ll make an exception since you were fired on Monday clear across the country, but still dare to come out to vacation on Friday. You can spin the wheel of destiny. Some things on the wheel are good and some things are bad – just like your week.” They make me swear to do whatever the wheel says. I look at the wheel and it has things ranging from “free drink” to “moon the crowd.” YIKES! I spin the wheel…click, click, click, click…it lands on “body shot.” Now I’ve never done a body shot before. When I was in college Tequila Poppers were the thing. I think body shots may have arrived after I graduated – or maybe I was too hammered from the tequila poppers to have realized the body shot craze. Anyhow, they bring me a shot of khalua. They make one of the guys from the band – the saxophone player – sit on a piano. The shot is placed between his legs (not touching anything) and I have to drink the shot without using my hands. I manage to succeed with only a little bit of the khalua going down my chest. The crowd approves…the pianos play my request. You know, this vacation is pretty damned fun. Hubby, if you were here you could have been the bodyshot guy!!!!!
7:30 Now I am hungry, so I wander down the street. I notice a sign that says it is a restaurant with the “largest collection of signed caricatures in the world.” I think that nothing could be more uninspirational than this, so I decide it is the perfect place for dinner. I enter the restaurant and the woman at the counter seems to be a man. Seriously, that was my first thought. My second thought was that her lipstick was really off kilter. My Aunt Lois is paranoid schizophrenic, deaf, and has many other ailments because Grandma had measles when she was pregnant (stick with me here…this does tie in). I stayed with my Grandparents a lot and Aunt Lois lived with them. I would always have to kiss her goodnight and she wore very bright very very off-kilter lipstick. This means that I have strong memories and associations with mental illness and off-kilter lipstick. I’m not too sure of this place, but it is getting more uninspiring by the minute, so I’m going to stick with it. The woman leads me to the table and as I follow behind her, I study her anatomy carefully. You know, I really think she is a woman after all. I just think there are certain curves you can’t fake. She seats me and before I can even crack open the menu, she gives me the 4 best things on the menu. What the heck. If there is one thing I did learn from my off-kilter lipstick Aunt Lois, it was that her wacky and often hallucinated advice was actually kind of profound and good in many ways, so decided to listen to this woman. I ordered the crab bisque, the filet mignon prepared the “special” way (off-kilter lipstick woman claimed she made-up the special recipe which is a garlicky preparation of some sort), and a glass of Cab. This dinner is FANTASTIC!!!! Really, so tasty.
A little about the decor. Apparently the owner of this place’s father did caricatures in a major hotel in New York. (I read all of this off of the front of the menu.) He would have famous people sign their caricatures. The owner has collected these signed caricatures and hung them in the restaurant. The pieces displayed over my table couldn’t be more perfect for my uninspired (and somewhat surreal) theme: Emporer Hirohito, General MacArthur, Ernest Hemingway, Nikita Khrushchev (signed in cyrillic!), Rudyard Kipling, Ferdinand Marcos, and Enrico Caruso.
That is enough for one day for me. Time to head for the hotel and sleep.
*Note: everyone in Orlando is German. Seriously, almost everyone around me who is not working at an establishment is German. I think I may have plunked myself down amidst some sort of huge German tour group. I have nothing against Germans, in fact, one of my best ex-coworkers from the old old old days and now cyber-pen pal is German. It is just that, of all nationalities to be streaming through the streets of Orlando, German is not what I expected. I think I can classify this as uninspired. I had visions of island-type people lining the streets of the city in colorful clothing and cheerful faces. Instead, I have Germans in nice kaki shorts and well ironed button down shirts, sturdily waving me past them as they pause for a photo. Did I mention that my uninspired theme is quickly turning surreal?