Drunk Texas Star

IMG-20120628-01607.jpg, a photo by karlakp on Flickr.

A night was had last night.

You've got one hungover Texpatriate blogging today. Last night was quite the night.

It started off innocuously enough. My friend Karen (The Blogless Scot) met some Texans carrying guitars on a tram, and found out they had a gig in Oslo on Thursday. She let me know about it,  so we decided to go for a bit of country music and boot scootin' fun.

It was so nice to feel that little bit of home. Hear the music, the Texas lilt of word and song, the way they would describe Texas landscapes and places in the music. Every song was about Texas in some way. It was balm for my soul. Brennen Leigh has a gorgeous voice, and she also writes some really good, funny and sweet duets that she sings with Noel McKay. There was a hysterical one about vacationing in Lubbock, which, if you know even a little bit about Texas, is not exactly a vacationing hot spot.

What was also fun about this show was that I, a Texan, attended it with a Welshwoman (my coworker Becky) and a Scot (Karen) where we sat with an Icelander who tried his best to dance with any of us, and on stage were Norwegians who I swear, when they sang, did better Texas accents than the real Texans. Those Norwegians WERE Texans when they sang. I loved it.

We left after Brennen Leigh's band were finished, and Karen and I said good night to Becky, as we live close to each other and Becky had to go a different direction,  just after the above picture was taken. (My phone died right after, so much for live tweeting the rest of the evening,) Karen and I walked up the block to encounter.....Pride Oslo. 

I should mention, I have been hankering to go out for a bit of dancing lately. Old skool, DJ beats, booty shakin', bass-thumping, thighs-are-tired dancing. So imagine my glee when there, right in the way for me to get home, is a freaking DJ playing some really good loud music, people dancing and laughing, bars in tents all around. It's like someone conveniently plonked a nightclub down for me to fall into. And fall into it Karen and I did.

We were greeted early on by a young Norwegian woman who shoved a shot (of vodka?) into Karen's face, who gamely necked it down. (A free shot in Norway? That's practically a miracle.) We grabbed some rosé at the bar (Gay Pride! Almost all the drinks were pink! Woo!) and commenced boogying. And boogying. AND boogying. What fun! We laughed, we drank (too much, oh too much), I was told how fabulous I was by admiring gay boys (well, I AM, dammit, and they loved my glasses) and Karen, being the most awesome people person, would randomly stop some pretty gay boy, start talking to him, and be his best friend within 3 seconds. That girl could charm the most mysterious spy into giving up all his secrets, she is just that easy to talk to. We were photographed by the official photographer of the party, so I think Karen and I have just been outed as Oslo's newest lesbian couple.

Needless to say, I thought, perhaps, when we first stumbled (literally) upon that party, that I was headed for a late night, and it was so.  We stumbled in, and hours later we staggered out of there around 2am, drunk as lords, giggling and laughing. Two Norwegian guys, also drunk, and hollering out their very NOT GAY status (gee, thanks, like I couldn't tell, gay boys would never have been such assholes) came up behind us as we left and grabbed a hearty handful of my ass. (I am not really sure what is going on, lately, but my ass seems to be an object of Norwegian drunk male desire.  Thats fine, I've worked hard on its improvement, but must they keep grabbing it? Can't they just nicely look?) We fended them off and then set off walking home, Karen and I, past the grounds of the Royal Palace and beyond. It was too late for a bus.

Karen, being possessed of quite possibly the world's smallest and most active bladder, which she tortures by filling with large amounts of cider and beer, realized, rather urgently, as we passed the Palace, that she had to pee. Luckily, it seems, Norwegian gardeners at the palace have nicely thought about errant Scottish bladders and have placed some very convenient bushes around the perimeters of the grounds. We found a likely prospect and Karen ducked behind it to offload some of the excess Bulmers. I was set to guard. Unfortunately, she kept making jokes while she was peeing, and I got rather giggly thinking about her peeing on the grounds of the Royal Palace behind a bush, and I kept laughing and she kept joking and one thing led to another and suddenly Karen's Pee Guard (me) went ass over applecorn into the protective pee bush. It was a big bush, a comfortable bush, and  the bit I landed in was nowhere near Karen's undignified activity, me being in the front of the bush (guard, remember?) her at the back. I really hope there is not a security camera anywhere that caught that on film, that bush rattling around as I extricated my giggling snorting self backwards out of it. I could hear Karen scuttling around back there, wondering what the hell was happening, and when she came out she said I was fired as guard for falling down on the job. That just made me laugh harder.

We carried on up the road, doing that walk where you are really quite sure you are going  perfectly straight until you catch yourself sort of veering off course, so you correct yourself, maybe too fast, and then sent yourself ricocheting in the other direction. You know that walk? Yeah, we bounced off each other like pinballs, bing bing bing!

We split off from each other, each of us having a further 2 blocks to go, and I wended my way home and upstairs. Home around 2am. Judging from the scatter of clothes, purse, shoes, etc, I pretty much just started undressing at the front door and left whatever I removed where it lay. Rich tried to wake me up this morning, was unsuccessful, and left me to it.

I woke up in full makeup, massive headache, one sock on and not much else, and the realization that I drunk facebooked my status for everyone to see before I passed out. I need a breathalizer for my computer.