Nickels OR Please Don't Put Money Down My Shirt

The other night I was driving home from Albuquerque, jammin' to my iPod. Prince's "Kiss" came on, and I just started thinking about how it would be a great theme song for my friends Rudy and Jacob if they ever decided to become Chippendale Dancers. Then I started thinking about how that would be a good fall-back career if the whole PJ thing doesn't work out. I think for Valentine's Day, I'm gonna burn them a CD of dancable tunes just so they can explore the option.
Things here are happy. I did have a disturbing dream last night that I was supposed to fly home from Poland, but my friends convinced me to go to Germany for a concert the weekend before. Unfortunately, I was too busy talking to Billy Joel about how we hate Nickelback and watching Brangelina dancing to notice that all the other people at this concert up and left. When I woke up the next morning, my friend Agnieszka told me the bad news-- there was now some kind of Marshall Law in Poland, and I wouldn't be allowed to leave Germany. I spent the rest of my dream trying to resign myself to a life of a Fraulein while trying to speak Polish to all the people around me. Agnieszka and I went to a McDonald's to purchase a plastic fork, but all I only had zloty and no euros. A girl I know from church, Malorie, was prancing around in a bathing suit, trying to entice all the German men. My friend Nathan took me to some underground meeting of Polish resistance. I woke up very stressed.
But I think I was starting to say that life is happy, which it is. Yesterday I got some time in with the nieces, which is always nice. Zoey was covered in makeup my mom had given her, but she let me wipe it off and redo her hair before we went to dinner with her parents. Z loves makeup. What else does she love? Money. She likes to have a little jingle in her pocket, I guess, so I gave her three quarters and a nickle (seriously, that's all I had on me). Well, while I tried to help her with her jacket, she kept tossing coins down my blouse. I told her not to-- that I was not a fountain, nor was I a stripper, but she kept doing it because she thought it was funny. What was slightly less funny was when she demanded I return the money and I was trying to shake it out of my top when some other patrons came into the restaurant. But what can you do?
One final thought on the money/body train-- the other night provided some good comic relief during a "game" of pool at the Institute. I am not a pool player, by a long shot. I've only picked up a queue/cue/long stick thing (how am I supposed to know how it's spelled? I can't be bothered to look it up) about half a dozen times in my life. My friend Justin was trying to instruct me on the finer points of pool, and to his credit, it didn't play off like a bar scene. Anyway, while I was trying to find a stance, lining up the balls, etc., this girl we'll call Mary came up behind me and said rather loudly, "Rachel, your underwear is showing." In case you don't know, I HATE groomers. Had I walked out with my dress tucked into my hosiery, that would be another story. But you know those people who feel it's their life mission to constantly adjust your clothes, pick lint off of your jacket, tuck in your tags, etc.? They rank up there on the annoying scale right along with people who buy vowels on Wheel of Fortune. Anyway, I just pulled my shirt down and my jeans up, and went about my business. Maybe I want my clothes to fit that way? I am a member of the sagging generation after all. But that is not the funny part of the story. Not 5 minutes later, Mary was sitting on our friend's lap with her back toward me and another guy. Her sweatshirt had ridden up and her jeans were falling down, and she was exposing about a foot of skin. So the guy next to me (a male version of the groomer, I'm sure) leaned over and said, "Hey, you'd better go tell Mary to pull her shirt down because we can see her nickel slot." (EW! I'd never heard a bum-crack called that before, and I was grossed out, but it made me laugh like a maniac.) On principle, I told him I wasn't going to do it, even though she'd just said something to me (for the record, there was no skin exposure with my earlier pool scenario). He persisted in telling me I ought to do something, and I finally said, "Listen, if you don't like it, just don't look!" What was very funny, though, was that our friend Justin was lining up a shot and had his bum in our faces at that precise moment. I wouldn't have even noticed, except he said, "Oh dear, I'm feeling very self-conscious right now." I laughed for about an hour. Of course, I couldn't tell him it wasn't about him as much as it was Mary and her nudey-botty, so poor little Justin kept thinking he was being sacrificed on the altar of a cruel joke. I think I finally convinced him we weren't laughing at him, but in the future, I think I'll just put a dollar on his back belt-loop and call it a day.