Pass The Butter Knife

Have you ever met someone who makes you want to stick a fork in your own eye? Wait, that’s too harsh of me; I wasn’t actually considering forking my eye until I was about thirty minutes into a three hour conversation with her. For the first fifteen minutes or so I thought about chewing my arm off just to see if she'd stop talking.

     Super nice lady, bless her heart, obviously off her Asperger's meds. I swear her lips NEVER STOPPED MOVING! Not even for a second. I didn't know listening could be so exhausting.

The following conversation isn’t verbatim because 1.) my mind kept wandering in between her verbose, Tolstoy-like telling of her life story and 2.) I jumped off the dock once or twice, but it went something like this: 

We’ll call her Gabby. (Not short for Gabrielle)

Me:  Nice to meet you. Is this your first time in the Virgin Islands?

Gabby: Oh no, (dismissive hand wave) we’ve been here a few times before, on big cruise ships. Well, only to St. Thomas, never to the British Virgin Islands, but we’ve been to St. Maarten, well that was on a different cruise, and we went to blah, blah, blah…

Me:  So how are you enjoying sailing?

Gabby: Oh we love it! (big toothy smile) And we just love these islands...we stopped and shopped back there, what a cute little village. I found some flipflops that I just had to have (heart grab gesture). They look a lot like a pair I got in New York, very stylish, little heel, I wore them to a Broadway play blah, blah, blah...

Me: I once killed someone with a butter knife.

Gabby: We had the best butter when we were in Paris! Have you been there? You should go! We stayed at the Chateau Frontenac and every morning we would have fresh pastries and baguettes with this to-die-for butter (heavenly eye roll) and blah, blah, blah…

Me:  I’m out on probation now. Last week I choked a chicken to death with my bare hands.

Gabby: I'll tell you who serves up a pretty good West Indian curried chicken, it's blah, blah, blah.  I tried curried goat once when we were in Jamaica but I didn't really care for it (icky face) but I ate it just to be polite because, you know, I didn’t want to offend the chef but it was blah, blah, blah...

Me: I got a goat drunk on wine once. Would you pass the wine?

Gabby: When we were in Napa we went to the Mondavi Winery, have you ever been there? You just have to go (squeezes my arm) they give you blah, blah, blah...

Me: I can juggle.

Gabby: I love Cirque du Soleil! (hand clap) We saw a show in Vegas last year, have you seen “O”? You just have to see it. And then we went dinner at blah, blah, blah...

Me: Yeah, I saw…

Gabby: No, it wasn’t “O”, it was “Mystere”, at Treasure Island but we stayed in that new luscious hotel, the one with (weird hand gesture) the blah, blah, blah...

Me:  I can hear my dog talking to me. 

Gabby:  Our yellow lab lived to be fifteen! FIFTEEN! We just lost him last summer. So sad (frown face, fake tear wipe) but we still have two cats blah, blah, blah…

Me:  Our cat pukes in her own dish when she eats too fast.   

Gabby:  Hahahahaha! (obnoxious fake laugh, too long, too loud [Authors Note here: it wasn’t intended to be funny, I was still trying to shock her back to reality] )  I had thee best lobster when we were on an Alaskan cruise, have you done an Alaskan cruise? You really should! It was so good and I ate it so fast that I thought I was going to be sick (finger down the throat gesture) so I had to blah, blah, blah...

Me: Pass me that butter knife, would ya? 

Ok, stick a fork in me, I'm done. And speaking of butter, here's a yummy steak butter. Put this Tarragon Butter on your steak as soon as it comes off the grill. It will dress up your NY or rib-eye pretty enough to go downtown, plus it melts into a creamy sauce. Go to the "Beef-Pork-Chicken" page to view it.

**Recipe my creation. Photo not taken by me with my cheap digital camera