The other one is actually a story, because it's a story she told me. When we were at Ixtapa having lunch, and I forget how we got around to this, she started telling me about places she'd had to go on business trips back when she still worked for Birmingham Steel (they have since closed that office). Apparently she was in Salt Lake City looking at something in Clearview, and it was too early in the evening to go back to the hotel and just twiddle thumbs for the rest of the night, so she and her coworkers went back into the city to get drinks. So they're at some bar, and my mom goes to the bathroom, and there is a woman so trashed that she's snorting coke in one of the stalls... OFF THE FLOOR. Seriously, drink in that horror for a moment. I mean, I have never been to a bar bathroom that was particularly clean, through no fault of the bar's--people drink too much, mistakes are made, lunches are lost. I'm just saying. OFF THE FLOOR.

So she comes back out, and she's about to report this to her coworkers when she notices a girl sitting on a pool table and the girl is with some guy and oh, hey, look! They're totally just having sex right there. Okay then! And she's pulling on one of her coworkers' sleeves to be  like WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE when she notices this woman really obviously trying to pick up a guy at the bar. Like, in an "I do this for a living" kind of way. And Mom kind of looks at the bartender, for some reason, and he can tell that they're all not from SLC and are kind of scandalized, and he says, with an apologetic shrug, and I am not making this up, "Oh, she's a regular. Has to be--the schoolteachers don't earn much around here."

I keep meaning to tell you a couple of stories about my mom, but I never quite get around to it. This may be in part because I can't figure out a way to turn "Mom happened to see Closer on cable and won't stop talking about it" into an actual story. The best part is that I'm pretty sure she didn't like the movie, but she spent about a week just not able to get over it and trying to repeat major chunks of dialogue to me, which NO NO PLEASE STOP YOU'RE MY MOM AUGH. She was really tickled by the way Natalie Portman would take Clive Owen's money and chirp "Thank you"--the part where he's asking what her name is. So she went around the whole week just saying over and over, in this tiny little voice, "Thank you! Thank you!"