At approximately 1 PM on a Friday afternoon – a Friday afternoon believed by most to be unlucky – I received an offer of four free VIP tickets to a concert in Wendover, Nevada. As I have said before (yesterday), lucky unlucky luck.
I immediately reached out to my friends and, by 3 PM, we had a plan to board a fun bus and head west to the land of visuals that don’t leave your mind for months, sometimes years.
Neither Respectable Professional or Sleepless had ever been on a fun bus. How have they gotten by all of these years? In addition, Respectable Professional, living up to her name, had never been to Wendover. I made a reservation on the bus as soon as I got the ticket offer because, being a fun bus regular, I know how quickly the buses fill up. “Be ready to be a minority,” I advised Respectable Professional. “Really?” she asked. “Really,” I replied.
I love the fun bus. I don’t have to drive, I can drink, I play B-I-N-G-O, and I am surrounded by something I don’t often see in the state in which I reside – diversity. I learned a great deal of wisdom from an Asian woman on the fun bus once. She asked my then boyfriend what he did for work, then said, “You make no money. No money, no honey.” So wise.
On this adventure, as we drank our maple whiskey and play what we coined GRINGO B-I-N-G-O, we received language lessons from a kind Hispanic lesbian. The lessons started when Respectable Professional asked her, “Como se dice cheers?” It ended, with a lot in the middle, when we arrived at our destination. “Hey white girl, 45 minutes f’d up! ¡Salud!”
It had actually been an hour and 45 minutes of f’d up, during which time we learned another valuable language lesson, “No f word on the bus. If you want to say the f word go outside.” That seemed so wrong because it changes the ‘fun bus’ to just ‘bus.’ Oh well, rules are rules. Something Ice Cream Man learned after placing a food order at a fast food restaurant seconds before the fun bus arrived to retrieve us. The bus, remember, no f-word, waits for no one. When it is time to go, it is time to go. Alas, Ice Cream Man had to run for the border (bus), literally, without his food.
As we crossed state lines and prepared for not-our-state shenanigans Ice Cream Man, who had been sitting quietly on the other side of the bus with his new pal, said the f-word, “”The fun bus made me leave my $17 of Taco Bell food behind. I better win big in Dover.” We hope so too. He already gambled once on food and lost – that’s pretty f’d up. Oh well, that was another state, another time. Here’s to greener pastures! ¡Salud!