THE JO-TEL …believes some of what Nathaniel and John say, but believes England is still our sovreign

Last Wednesday I went to Kristin Cavallari’s 21st birthday party.

Well, I should be clear.

Her birthday was January 5. That night she evidently partied somewhere.
THEN, last weekend, she went to Vegas and had another birthday party.

So this was her third, at least.

It must be weird to be a celebrity and have people you don’t know throw you birthday parties, invite a bunch of people you don’t know including other celebrities that you may or may not know and may or may not care for, and then have publicists contacting media outlets to cover your party, so everybody sees how cool you are. It’s kind of like when you were a kid, and your parents would just invite your whole class to your parties — partly so you’d get more gifts, and partly so the creepy kid with the eczema wouldn’t feel left out, and partly so you could have decent-sized teams for Red Rover — but mostly so you’d feel cool.

So anyways, Hilary and I showed up at like 10, and it was surprisingly packed. I was immediately met with my normal dilemma when I enter a bar with a shitty beer selection (i.e., the Heineken/Amstel Light/Corona cadre), namely, what do I order? I’m not really a fan of any mixed drinks, which puts me at a distinct disadvantage in, you know, bars. I’ve been considering the mint julep as maybe my go-to drink. It’s got bourbon, sugar and mint. People seem shocked when I tell them I order juleps, which I don’t exactly get. I understand the julep has a certain reputation, but really, anyone who’s ever ordered a mojito past 6 p.m. doesn’t have a leg to stand on, to say nothing of some of the other crap that people order. “My drink is basically a rocks glass full of whiskey with some sugar in it. Your drink is bright red and has an orange floating in it. Do you really want to have this conversation?”

So I drank that. Then I ordered another one from a cocktail waitress. It came back with like six big pieces of lime in it. Now, mint juleps have been around for at least 200 years, and the recipe could not be more well-established. Furthermore, the fact that whoever made this drink didn’t pause when he or she was pouring bourbon over limes and go “Wait. This is going to taste like shit. This can’t be right” is even more troubling. Why not just add a liberal dollop of Colgate to a screwdriver, at this rate? I mean, I drank it, but I wasn’t happy about it.

But when the waitress brought me another one similarly made, I mentioned to her that the drink was made wrong, and could I please have one without the six lime wedges. She seemed to see my point, but when she came back, she was all “He made it with lime again. I tried to tell him.” This is already a patented PETE-style tirade (the boring and tedious kind, not the funny kind), and I don’t want to get TOO carried away, but there are so many problems with this response I don’t even know where to start. I wound up having to go to the bar myself and find the guy who made my first one in order to get a potable drink. In the meantime however, I’d choked down 1.5 bourbon mojitos, and was pretty fucking wasted.

I could go in a few directions now. The most enticing for me would be to use this series of incidents as a synecdochic condemnation of the whole Hollywood bar scene, but really the only thing I’m getting at is that I was far too wasted to notice any of the celebrities around, and DEFINITELY too wasted to talk to K.C. again, to see if I could pick up where I left off at the AIDS Carnival. And this was before we met the dude who was staying at the hotel attached to the bar, and who insisted on buying Hil and I more drinks on his expense account.

Oh! And taking a page from Hip E.’s playbook, I managed to lose my ATM card that night, less than 48 hours after receiving it in the mail because I’d lost my old card a week previous. So I got that going for me.

As a reward for sitting through this entire thing, here’s a picture of KC from her party:

-PETE