Dinner With The Boys

No meal is so good as when a man cooks it. While I feel very secure in saying the lion's share of cooking in the world is done by women, the best and most memorable meals I have ever enjoyed were prepared by men. This is one reason why our weekly dinner with the boys is so nice.

Usually our friend Sam cooks. He was born in Naples, Italy, and cooks like his mother does, except better. Other friends inquire every Thursday morning about what we had for dinner at Sam's Five-Star Restaurant. But this week was unusual because Randy cooked for us at his hunting lodge. Going there is an interesting experience.

If I can every really forget that I'm usually the lone chick at these dinners, I could not forget it out there. First, Randy made it very plain that the lodge, which is called The Horny Doe, is a "guys" place. Few women have ever darkened the door. The furniture is all large and rustic, and the walls are covered in dead animals. By my count, there were nine deer, two turkeys, a pheasant, a bobcat, a javelina and an antelope, not to mention numerous large fish and other assorted antlery from a variety of large creatures. Dinner was wild turkey killed by Randy himself, the buckshot we occasionally found in our teeth clear proof of this. Afterward we enjoyed a beer on the back deck and watched some basketball.

Food and ambiance aside, the dinners are a nice treat each week. I feel kinda special because they don't treat me special. They don't curtail their cursing, they don't wait until I'm out of the room to tell an embarrassing story involving shit, they don't think twice about saying some woman on TV has a nice rack, and are not afraid to say, "Hell no, I'm not taking my wife to Vegas with me," because they know I won't go tell her. That's really cool.