Back around the holidays, I was invited to join a friend of mine for her company holiday party at one of San Francisco’s majestic hotels atop Nob Hill. After spending the summer in hiking shoes and shorts while hiking around the Teton Mountain range, I was back in the city, staying with a girlfriend with a fantastic wardrobe and was excited to dress up for the night. Of her many dress options I chose a black capped-sleeve shirt dress that had an A-line cut which cascaded to my ankles. It tied in a bow behind my back and was cute, tasteful, with a hint of sophistication. I decided I could go sexy with the shoes instead, and went with her BCBG label four-inch gold heels that sat still wrapped up in tissue paper in a box in her closet. For a woman, there’s nothing better than getting dolled up for a party. The shopping, the manicures, the time with girlfriends discussing what you are going to wear, it’s all part of the process for transforming back into the feminine, it’s a part of getting back in touch with ourselves.
I noticed how good I looked when I set out that evening to meet a friend of my mother’s at the Fairmont Hotel for a glass of wine beforehand, and I was proud that I could clean up so well after being dusty for so long. But I also noticed how I didn’t look like a two-bit whore, with a short and slinky dress, like I may have before I had matured. Classy was the word I would have given me had I been a stranger who saw me on the street. And lucky for me, my friend’s brother gave me a ride down the hill from her house, otherwise I would have been stuck, because I couldn’t really walk in those heels, at least, not downhill.
I had my glass of wine and had an intellectual conversation with this new friend about the universe, black holes, and string theory. Had I been a single man at the bar overhearing my conversation, I would have thought, “Hmm… sexy and smart.”
Once I got to some flat ground, I was able to navigate beautifully in said heels. I entered my friend’s holiday party, found her table, went through the buffet, and then tried to get my dancing shoes to move to the eighties cover band. That same night, there was an important fundraiser for James Kim, the father tragically lost in the mountains in Oregon, and friends were spinning house music to raise money for his daughters’ future education. So after a couple of hours of dinner and small talk, I decided to get myself to the fundraiser in order to give back and boogie like I had needed.
The doorman whistled for a taxi and a yellow minivan pulled up. It sounded a bit rattly, but I had ridden in thirty year-old Peugeots leftover from the French colonization in Laos, and a few sounds under the hood in a San Francisco taxi cab wasn’t going to leave me stranded, so I entered the cab. A man with a blue ski hat sat in front as the driver and I said, “Hello.” I am always kind to cab drivers. My old boyfriend had had a love affair with driving a taxi cab his whole life and when he finally tried to do it in San Francisco for three months, he said that it had been the hardest job he had ever had. Also, I’m basically curious about all people, and taxi drivers, especially the ones who haven’t originated in my home country, are the ones I want to know where they are from and how they arrived here. In the over thirty countries that I have traveled to as a solo woman, it’s with the taxi drivers where I’ve had my most interesting conversations.
