A few weeks ago, Mrs. Pessor and I were being seated in a restaurant for lunch. We were given a table right next to two fiftysomething ladies, one of which was just finishing up telling what appeared to be a quite sad or extreme story to the other. The following is what my wife and I both heard and we’ve not been able to get it out of our heads ever since:
listener: “Oh my gosh I had no idea!”
storyteller: “Yeah. Soooo, that’s why we don’t play scrabble anymore.”
listener: (taken back) “WOW. I guess.”
But just so you understand their facial expressions and the intensity, it was as severe as if, say, she had lost a child to a waterskiing accident or something this severe and delivered the line “Yeah. So that’s why we don’t go to the lake anymore.”.
But Scrabble???
I haven’t played an honest game of Scrabble in a while, but IIRC, there isn’t much bloodshed. What the hell could’ve happened during their Scrabble match that was so outrageous or bad?
“Spouse gets ‘xylophone’ on a triple word score, turns English professor homicidal”?
The weirdest thing I overheard came from this really weird-ass girl in my Amer.Lit. class. She’s always sort of…unkempt looking, her hair unbrushed, with blue eyeliner smeared in the general vicinity of her eyes on good days. Her clothes are very nice if preppy, like LLBean-style, but they are always wrinkled and dirty-looking. She always, always looks stoned out of her mind, with glazed-over eyes. She talks in this long, drawn-out nasally whiny whispery voice.
She truly mystifies me.
One day, I got to class just a few minutes before it began and my usual seat was taken, so I sat on her left. She was talking to the girl on the right and I heard her say, “…I had sex with a Nigerian prostitute last year, so you know” and then she sighed dramatically.
But it really sounds like this:
“Iiieeeee haaaad seeex with a Niiieeeegeeereeeeaan pprostituuuuute laaaaast yeeeeerrrr, so youuuuu knooooow.”
No, I don’t know! Tell me, please, you weirdo freak! Besides the obvious questions (did you meet him in a bar? did you have an orgasm? how much did it cost? did you do it in a cheap motel?), what should I knooooow? What obviously follows that line?