Thursday, May 1, 2008

She put the "fun" in dysfunctional

So, last weekend we celebrated Jamie's birthday. He had a baseball game on Friday night (which was his actual birthday). Since it was my day off, we had a nice lunch together during his conference period. We had reservations at Benihana's on Saturday night to have a celebration with our friends. It took some planning in advance since there were 4 couples (some of us with kids which means getting sitters, etc). Everything was set and we arrived right on time for our reservation. It should have been a really nice evening.

Jamie and I have talked about this so many times since it happened, and we've come to the realization that no matter how we tell the story, we cannot do it justice. You just had to be there. I'm not even going to try to go into details about what happened at the restaurant, because it would just be inadequate no matter what I say. But I'll sum it up by saying that there was a REALLY intoxicated woman with a 2-month old baby at the grill directly across from us. She made a scene for a good hour and a half and was finally escorted out of the restaurant. Some of the highlights (or lowlights I should probably say) included her standing up and pointing and yelling at other restaurant patrons, falling down while holding her baby, accusing our whole table of being racist and personally attacking one of our guests for absolutely no reason, and having a screaming match with her husband while he kept telling her to "sit down and shut up".

Needless to say Jamie's dinner was totally ruined. I complained to the restaurant staff 3 times before they did anything about it. They told me they'd called the police, because I was VERY unsettled by the idea of her taking her baby home that night. The cops never showed up. I now question if they were ever called in the first place. If I had known, I would have called myself. I've been just sick thinking of what may happen to that baby. At the end of the night, they refused to even discount our meal. We did not leave a tip.

Luckily we had a really nice family celebration on Sunday, and I hope it made up for the disaster from the night before. I wish I had some pictures of us with our friends to share, but that whole meal was so interrupted by the drama going on in the room that I didn't even think to take one.

I'm already thinking about planning my 30th birthday party, and now I've decided that it will definitely involve a private room!

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