Okay so we go to this event at my wife's school (Mother of Good Counsel = MGC) called Taste of MGC. It is a lot of fun and frollicking (sp?) but can be expensive as you will see. Tickets are $25 per person to begin with. It is held in the gym and all around the walls on two sides are about 12 or 13 restaurant representatives with free samples of their food. So there is pizza, and sirloin steak wraps, and crab bisque (yum!), and turkey pot roast, and Jambalaya, and pork with red cabbage, and donuts and ice cream and, and,and .... Now all this is teeny little portions so you can try just about everything. This is really quite fun, with the possible exceptions of it is so crowded that you can lose a wife in the blink of a crab bisque bite if you are not totally vigilant.

Then, in the middle of the gym is a rectangle of long school-type tables. These are covered with baskets full of goodies in shrink-wrapped plastic. This is a silent auction where you sign your name and put your bid on a piece of paper, and then check back to see if anyone has out-bid you so you can bid again, etc. The short-term version of ebay. Also there are things like a dinner for four, or a night for two at casino Aztar (which also included passes to Blue River canoeing, Marengo Cave, Squire Boone Cave and other stuff). I wanted to win that one but did not - which is a good thing, financially speaking, as you will see.

Now drinks are not included in the $25 ticket price. I actually think that is a strategic error on the part of the event putter-oners. We used to go to these things at St. X (called X-Travaganza, BTW) and the drinks were free ... a very smart move because drunken people cannot WAIT to outbid each other on total nonsense. But I digress.

So we buy tickets and get some wine ... actually my wife gets wine ... I have another diabolical plan. See they do not sell whiskey, and whiskey (with ginger ale) is my drink of choice, except when I like to drink wine which was not that night. So, I brought along my trusty (and sneaky) flask of good old Jack Daniels. Well I can't tell you how juvenile it feels to sneak into an elementary school bathroom to mix up a high ball amid all those urinals that are 12" off the floor. Now THAT is just wrong.

So here we are, alcoholic drinks in hand and all this food and friends and frivolity. Now it is VERY crowded, as I already said. And you have your sample of crab bisque which takes two hands to eat. There is hardly anywhere to set a drink, so the only intelligent thing to do (question on the "intelligent" part, as you will see) is .... drink it! So we do. Then we eat a little, eat a little more - and DANG I'm thirsty. So it's back to the bar for another ginger ale and wine, back to the restroom for the mixing of the high ball amid the urinals, etc.

Now, repeat the last paragraph a few times.

So now, here we are, well-lubed, so to speak, replete with food of every type, and we start looking at the silent auction stuff. Did I mention we were pretty well lubed? Well, in that condition, and since it IS, after all, a fund raiser for the school, and since, after all, people ALWAYS come along and outbid us on stuff, we just start bidding. This is the part where it is really great that I didn't win the Aztar trip .... BTW, I was only outbid by $5.00 ... praise God (the one who may or may not exist depending on the outcome of Bleaches survey).

I suppose that, all things considered, in the end we really got off easy. My lovely actually won a basket that she didn't even remember bidding on with some not-so-attractive jewelry, etc. But that's not all. We actually won THREE baskets, and one was so heavy I had to move the car closer to the gym just to take it home. I was capable of that task, but Susan volunteered to drive home - and I be letting her!

In the end we had a nice big bottle of Woodford Reserve (that me and a guy named Bart had to crack 'cause the flask was long gone), about 10 bottles of wine, a bunch of those little whiskey sample bottles, a purse, some gift certificates, a picture, a scarf, a bunch of italian cooking stuff, and God (same one as before) knows what all else. But it was a LOT of what else.

The total on the night was I think $335. For that kind of money we could have had the best dinner at Ruth Chris, lots of great wine and a night on the town in a damn limo.

Man, these Catholic Schools know how to throw a fund-raiser.

PS Almost half the money was for the big basket put together by parents of Susan's fifth-graders, so we were practically obligated to snag that one. So I don't feel quite so silly. However, we'll be eating brats and beans for a while all the same.

PPS I also forgot to mention that there was a band at the end, they were great, people were in a very happy mood (including us) and we had a fabulous time. And the school really needs (and deserves) the moola, so ..... it's all good.