I love Willhoite's.
Why?
For a million reasons, but mostly because they have a kickass lunch buffet that my friend Sarah and I like to hit up on a regular basis, but also because it’s a great place to people-watch. And by people-watch, I mean stare at hot-mess townies. Unfortunately the buffett and hot-mess townies don’t overlap as there aren’t too many drunks roaming Main Street on Tuesday afternoons. Go figure.
Sidenote: I was briefly friends with a guy who told me that he once went home with a woman he picked up at Willhoite’s. She turned out to be forty-four and a mother to three kids, two of which were teenagers. My friend was twenty-six. Classic.
End sidenote.
Anyway, I readily agreed to join them and while the band was fun but (at times) talentless (seriously, their cover of Purple Rain?), Willhoite’s did not disappoint.
And it’s all thanks to Jessica.
To be honest, we really have no idea what her name was, but the four of us took turns coming up with possible monikers because we got tired of saying things like, Hey, look, the drunk girl’s back! Tagging a name to a sloppy face was much easier, not to mention much more amusing. The point is that this woman was the embodiment of DTF (and if you don’t know what that is…look it up). She was the personification of not giving a damn, the ghost of every drunken hook-up ever to take place in the history of the world.
In a word, Jessica was fun.
Jessica took to the dance floor with wild, reckless abandon, continually coming back with different men and progressively giving fewer & fewer shits as the night went on. It’s hard to say if the rest of the bar viewed her as much of a joke as we did. I’d like to think everyone else was in on it as well, and that the dudes romantically banging against her were aware that on the balcony above sat four incredibly entertained twenty-somethings watching their every move (and, sure, at times cheering them on).
Bringing the evening to a brilliant crescendo, Jessica brought one lucky lad over to the enormous fireplace that made up one complete wall surrounding the dance floor and straddled him while, I shit you not, gyrating on beat to the band’s rendition of Play That Funky Music, White Boy. Between the humping and the forced chest-grabbing (girlfriend was not afraid to let everyone know exactly what she wanted), Jessica was a sight to behold.
Bless her heart.
I was more than happy urging Mitch to ask her for a dance –- it was the night before our anniversary, and really, what could be a better gift?
Sadly, he declined, possibly out of fear of molestation.
Eventually, Harrison, Kelsey and Mitch were forced to drag me away from the train wreck with which I’d become obsessed. And sure, a little part of me feels sorry for Jessica – who knows what’s actually going on in her life? Maybe she just lost her job or is in the middle of a nasty divorce with her husband over an illicit affair involving one or more of the bartenders? It’s hard to say, but maybe she needed the magic that only Willhoite’s and embarrassing amounts of sloppy public make-outs can bring to shine a little light back into her life.
If that’s the case then I say, you play that funky music, Jessica. You play that funky music right.
And party on.
