SpoKompton

The other day my mother and I (in a more sane mood, thankfully) made the epic journey over the mountains to Spokane. See, I took my wedding dress to an experienced seamstress to be altered in APRIL and not only had she not completed it by the time I got back from Seattle (end of June) but she had, in fact, hijacked my dress to Spokane without even calling us!

We had already driven over once for a "final fitting" which actually meant she hadn't done anything except rip off the sleeves and cut the hem....not even ironed. Well at this point I was ready to snatch the dress and run screaming out of the house, sleeves or no sleeves. But my mother, in all her mandatory Southern politeness, insisted that the progress was acceptable because "For heaven's sake she just moved! Its a wonder her house is unpacked, she must be very busy!"

Take a moment to wrap your head around that.

Moving on, we did get the dress yesterday and it is "finished" and by that I mean she somehow decided to narrow the sleeves so they are each about 2" too small for my arms. Any brides out there with 10" biceps who want a dress? Anyway, we decided to take it home and fix it ourselves. She had the audacity to charge us $450, but we just wanted to get the hell away from her house of dress butchery.

So we stopped for lunch at the lovely Northtown Mall. And this was truly an experience of observing local culture. Firstly, the Chilis in that mall is full of people who don't want to be there. While this is probably true of many Chilis, these employees were actually very vocal about it. When the hostess was showing us to our table she asked how we were, and we asked her the same, of course expecting the obligatory "fine." Instead: "Well pretty damn good because I think this is my last day working here!"

As she left I leaned over and whispered to my mom how glad I was she wasn't our server, then our bizarrely chipper waiter came over to ask us how we were at auctioneer-pace, we repeated this little dance and he said "Great, its Friday and I don't have to come back to this awful place for 3 days!"

Also sited at Chilis: 4 waitresses with ponytails so ratty I'm sure they're a healthcode violation, 1 Asian waitress with hair so blond that when I saw her face it took me a second to process she was Asian, and 1 obese customer lifting up her top to display- and scratch- her muffin top.

And the rest of SpoKompton was pretty similar: lots of girls wearing see-through shirts with ratty bras, a giant detour that circumscribed the city and took us back to exactly where we started, and gold rims on cars with chipped paint. Why, Spokane, why?