Mick Jagger appears briefly as a drag queen

Last night we went to happy hour with 'the gang,' which turned into dinner and a reminder that drinks + crayons + paper tablecloths = you'd better leave the server a nice tip. We typically organize our get-togethers by email, and I kept noticing messages from a guy named "Greg Ran"* ... yet I'd never met Greg Ran. So we arrived at the bar and I turned to our pal Norm to ask, "So who the hell is this Greg Ran guy? I always see emails from him, and I've never met him!" Norm sighed. "Um, that's me."

So I've known Norm for a year, yet not known Norm.

Anyway, we sidled up to the bar and I noticed that the bartender was grubbing through a giant jar of black cherries (or black olives, who could tell). I was briefly disgusted by the idea that he took money crawling with bacteria from people and also handled drink accents with the same filthy fingers, but of course by the time I ordered I'd already forgotten. Drink #1 was a "Back in Black" martini that looked like a urine sample and tasted like Nyquil. It was two-for-one martini night, so I tried again. "I'd like a dirty martini. Make it really dirty. Filthy."

Later, as I accidentally stabbed my eye with the skewer of olives, it came back to me. "Ew," I said to J, "I just remembered that he touched money AND these olives with the same fingers."

J shrugged. "You wanted it dirty!"

Indeed I did, I mused, and chewed an olive thoughtfully.

This morning a snowstorm hit, and as I skipped through dreamland, J sat next to me and roused me with a gentle, "Honey? I'm running late for work. Do you think you could snowblow today?"

I groaned and pressed a pillow over my head.

"It's really easy."

"No," I moaned, wanting to return to the bizarre dream I'd been having: a biopic on the life of Geraldine Ferraro, who did not fall from political grace due to shady spousal business issues but rather, a leaked video of her smoking a doobie and doing a song and dance number with Liza Minelli at a party at Johnny Carson's house.

"Sweetie," J persisted gently, "It's really easy. All you have to do is...."

Here he said things about levers and start buttons and such, but I was already tuning out. Johnny Carson was starting a conga line, and I didn't want to miss it.

"And guess what else?" he cajoled, in the same voice you might use to convince your kids that cleaning their room will be an adventure, "You'll discover something men everywhere don't want their wives to know!"

"What, that they're lazy?" I mumbled.

"No," he said. "That snowblowing is FUN!"

Later, he even described deciding where to shoot the excess snow, which was my main concern, as 'like completing a puzzle!' But I've never been into Tetris or Jenga, really. So I'm going out to try this jazzy, exciting new activity shortly, and I can already tell you. It will not be fun.

*I've changed the name to protect the privacy of ... Norm.