Fortune Cookie Love at Eastern Market

I think I need to take more risks, be daring- live a little more. Cliche sentiment? maybe. Read on, if you dare.

The trendy little neighborhood in DC known as Eastern Market is a mixed bag. You will find foo foo restaurants, bars and dive restaurants and bars. Its a great place to hang out and live if you are a 20 or 30 something living in DC.

A couple of friends and I are waiting for another friend to get off work (she is a stage manager for theaters; as in theaters with plays, Shakespeare, etc). We were on our way out to Arlington to this great movie theater that was showing Office Space 2, where you can catch a cheap movie and drink lots of cheap beer and eat buffalo wings. I didn't even know a place like this existed in DC- so I was thrilled to be going on this little adventure to say the least.

So Sharon was running late- as is usual, just the nature of the theater beast. So Jesse, Daniel and I are just standing at the metro stop waiting- we were running out of time before the movie started- it looked like we were going to be late.

Daniel suggests that we go grab a quick beer while we are waiting. Me, being the more practical one, says "Are you crazy? She is going to be done any minute, and then either we wont get to drink our beer or we will be even more late!" The boys won 2 to 1.

Their reasoning was this "Come on, what is the likelihood of Sharon calling us at the exact 10 seconds when we are handing the cash over to the bartender? If she calls us before we order the beer, then we just cancel the order and go meet Sharon. If she calls after we have made the order, then we will just down our beers fast and go! There is a 1 % chance of her calling during the monetary exchange!" Whatever. so we go.

We walk into this little Irish dive bar- my favorite kind of place (not kidding). The bartender is a plump blond woman with her hair in a long ponytail (like she hasn't had a trim in ages). She asks for our IDs, and as I am pulling mine out of my wallet I notice that a fortune from a fortune cookie that I have been carrying around for months was static clung to my license. It reads "A very attractive person will desire your company." Immediately I take it off- but then I had a second thought. What if I left it stuck to my license- I wonder what the bartender would do? Its like a sociological experiment. Normally, I would probably have chickened out and not done it, but for some reason I decided to do it.

So I hand over my license and the woman is standing there looking at my license for what seemed to be 2 minutes. Then she looks up at me and says "a very attractive person wants to see me, huh?" and then lets out a cackling loud laugh. I just sort of laugh shyly and say "Oh, is that my fortune? It must have gotten stuck." She looks at me and makes eye contact and grins from ear to ear- like she is suspicious.

Anyway- so we are handing our money to the lady, and guess who calls during the 10 second exchange? SHARON. We all start laughing our asses off and loudly try to decide what to do. We hadn't accounted for this possible scenario! We decided to get the beer and down them as fast as possible.

So the point of the story I suppose is the fortune cookie. I love doing things like that- totally weird things just to see what peoples reactions are. I want to do more of that. Maybe I could start some sort of art project that logs such experiments with photographs...