Gig

Last night I went to a gig. This is a word my church music friends use to refer to any professional engagement (I think more to seem drily reductive and offhand about the whole business than in any real attempt to make conducting Vaughan Williams appear hip) so I should clarify that this was not chamber music but a friend's rock band. Initially I was unperturbed by his claim that it was a bit of a distance, but this was foolishly forgetting that I am in Toronto, where two blocks can mean fifteen miles, and "a bit of a distance" means "book a flight." Well, it was sweet of him to ask me, but I'm not awfully good at bestirring myself to this kind of thing, being extremely idle and almost always inappropriately shod, so I settled on a Saturday night at home reading the paper and painting my nails. However, I ended up at an engagement even further out of town (does this city never end? It must have suburbs on the moon), and since by 11pm I was actually in a cab passing the junction where the gig was, I felt it the action of a wilful churl to head straight for the subway.
Unfortunately, since fate had all but delivered me there, I hadn't really considered that I had to get home as well. When I looked at my watch and realised that I had missed the subway, I was of the mind that it was not the end of the world. When I spent 40 minutes ringing three cab companies 600 times each and got no reply, I was somewhat troubled. When I couldn't actually see any cabs, or indeed buses, streetcars or signs of inhabitation in any surrounding buildings, I started to panic, and a sick realisation spread through me that the black leather skirt which had seemed so amusingly off-whack for a suburban dinner party was wont in my current much-altered circumstances to lead to potentially unpleasant misunderstandings about my purposes in walking up and down a badly-lit street at 2 o'clock on a Sunday morning, and that "I'm trying to hail a taxi" was unlikely to sound convincing coming from a heavily made-up and precipitously-heeled lone female hanging about an intersection. Having dropped in to the bloody event for no reason but chumminess with the guitarist, I knew not one single other person there, even supposing they hadn't all left already, which they had. And I wasn't wholly sober.
By the time it was clear that I couldn't get back any other way, the band had packed up and despite having said they couldn't one of them kindly drove me home, no doubt far out of his way, so I felt like a total nuisance and an utter imposition as well as the worst kind of helpless and demanding female, and I don't even know to get hold of him to say thank you. Today I am hungover and tired and grumpy.

The set was quite good though.