In Vinum Est Veritas

My brother Ardo invited me to attend a Wine Dinner on Friday night at the Faculty Club where he works. It was to be accompanied by a talk from Rex Pickett, the guy who wrote 'Sideways'. Did you see the movie 'Sideways'? The evening was billed as "Merlot Fights Back!" because in the movie Merlot is seriously trashed. This led us all to believe that perhaps Mr. Pickett was going to speak on the virtues of Merlot and since each course was to be accompanied by a different Merlot we thought that he'd describe each Merlot served as we ate. Boy were we wrong!

I went to this event with my lovely sister-in-law, Kay Marie. The food was really great and by the time dessert was served everyone was quite happy, including our speaker, who by the way did not speak to us during the dinner.

The mistress of ceremonies stood to introduce him and started her introduction by saying "Our guest speaker has asked if we could get this over with..." not a statement that portends an excellent speech.

Then Mr. Pickett stood to speak, a relatively good looking man probably in his mid 50's. His first statement was that he had awakened at 3 a.m. having a panic attack and had decided at that point that he was not going to attend the dinner.

That was enough to make the rest of us wish we hadn't. The rest of the speech can only be described as a total and complete train wreck. The man was drunk and unprepared, he rambled and swore and most of his comments centered around 'getting laid'. It was sad and I'd like to think that if the man saw himself on tape later he'd be embarrassed, but I think somehow that he's way beyond that.

Senior faculty members began to leave discreetly at first and then later, in not so discreet groups.We began plotting our own escape. It seemed that every once in a while he'd say something semi lucid and people would clap, these would seem to have been good opportunities for him to sit down and stop talking, but he didn't, he just rambled on. Finally, after our escape through the kitchen had been planned out, he stopped talking and sat down, there were applause at this though I'm not sure if they were in gratitude that he finally shut up or if there were those out there who truly enjoyed the 'speech'.

Thank goodness the food was great and the company even better.