I had several Stepford situations on Friday. It was weird.
First one was walking into spin class. I have to tell you that once the small group of normal folks found out I was exercising at the posh club I was often asked out the Stepford wives and how they were about me infiltrating their territory. I thought I was doing just fine since I wasn't attending too many of their classes, and I suspect that the true Stepford girl is more likely to go to hip hop aerobics than lift weights and maybe even spin. Spinning just seemed to collect a varied bunch of outsiders and I was good and safe in spin until Friday. I walked in to spin and my Stepford radar went completely wild. My eyes fell on two Wives who were whispering to each other.
As I tried to angle past one of them towards the back row of bikes she very familiarly and overly cheerfully said "Hi!" to me. I'm pretty sure I have never seen her before. So I gave her a polite (don't bite me) smile back and said a reserved (It is best not to excite a Wife) "Hello" and the Wife dismounted her bike and followed me to my bike and started to telling me how she met Matt at the (now ex-girlfriends Jew hating) country club and how Matt was so sweet to everyone there, and how he was engaging and charming and even found time to have chit chat with the mothers like her and some very nice stuff about Matt. I told her I was so happy to hear these things and thanked her and asked about the now ex-girlfriend whose mother sent her to (jail) an all girls boarding school where she doesn't even get to go home for weekends. The wife told me her name and asked me to tell Matt that she said "Hello."
But I know I had never met this overly familiar with me Wife before (but I did kind of know her whisper buddy) and I am sure they were either talking talking about me when I walked into the room or had merely whispered something along the lines of "That's the one we were talking about last night at Bunnie's botox party!" when I appeared and I am totally creeped out that the Wives have me on their radar. So I watched them (never turn our back on a Wife!) and their bad form and their inappropriate clothes (I mean, who wears a cami with a thin strapped underwire bra to the gym?) for the whole spin class.
Then on the way out of spin class, which happened to be a fairly vigorous class (at least for those of us commomers who did things like stand on our bikes when the instructor said stand and turn up the resistance when the instructor said turn it up) the Wife I had actually spoken to a time before was walking right behind me and she said "You did really great for your first spin class, you finished and everything."
Uh.
Ah.
thought in my head: FUCK YOU BITCH!!
words out of my mouth: "Oh, this was not my first spin class. I haven't been around since the spring because I was at my house on a lake all summer."
So, score two for the Wives, I left the gym totally creeped out knowing I had been their recent topic of discussion, and that tall skinny bitch managed a biting insult on the way out.
Then when I asked Matt about the Wife who had the kind of words about him he didn't know what I was talking about. Then (because I raised him right and he is the best!) he said "Wait, was she one of those overly tan bleached blonde women?" Thinking he remembered her and I could find out all the details of their encounter I said "Yes! That's her!" Matt looked at me and came back with "Mom, you know I can't tell those kind of ladies apart!"
Score one for my team.
Then Friday night I had an assignment to cover a party in the next town over, which just might have a more serious infestation of Wives than my current town of residence. Luckily a writer from our paper came to the party too, and she is not one of them, she is very normal. We walked into this party, and oh my lord, I have never seen so many Wives all drunk and all gathered in the same place at one time. I was scared people. I may or may not have had an allergic reaction to silicone while there because good lord, I have never even imagined so many undernourished skeletal ladies packing big DD's in one room before. It was ... shocking. And as an added twist these wives were predominately very very tan. And also pretty darned wrinkled. Hand me some sun screen please. Being around all those Wives was nerve racking simply because I was so outnumbered. I mean, what if they wanted me, and then they would lock me on a tanning bed and not feed me until I was all brown and skinny. shivers.
Then the Wife throwing party introduced me to her best friend, a scrawny yet magically busty older looking bleached blonde in a baby doll dress who has obviously spent the summer on a lounge chair at the beach (leather chair skin!). It was a terrifying sight.
But, true to form, I bumped into the best friend (okay I thought it was her) by the buffet table an hour later and said something which seemed to confuse the best friend, until the actual best friend came over and I realized that I couldn't tell overly tanned bleached blondes apart either!
Luckily, we got out of there alive. We were in shock. On the ride home the writer and I kept saying Oh My God over and over.
