Little table: The next generation.

(Originally published 3/13/2006)

I was tall for my age. I remember being able to see over everyone’s heads in middle school and I have towered over my mother since the fifth grade. But despite my height and my evident maturity (I was already weary of the Reagan Administration and "St. Elsewhere" was my favorite show), I was still forced to sit at the Kiddie Table during family dinners. I waited years to sit with the adults and pass the cranberry sauce to crazy Great Aunt Margaret. One by one, my older cousins (all of whom I was taller and smarter than) who preceded me to the adult table were slowly bumped out, some due to pregnancy and marriage (usually in that order), prison, or God-willing college.

Surprisingly enough, all those years of eyeballing my older sister’s and cousins’ spots at the table proved futile. What ended up getting me an empty spot was one of my family’s trademarked traditions, the redneck divorce. Aunt Vicky called it quits with Uncle Jerry when he burned her boyfriend’s trailer to the ground. A woman can only take so much.

By the time I got up there the adult table was about as fabulous as Barbara Bush couture. By then my female relatives’ ovaries had taken the call to populate Mississippi. Babies ran amok. No one could sit still long enough to see me passing the cranberry sauce to anyone, much less to Great Aunt Margaret, who’d been dead for years. There suddenly was endless butt-wiping to be done, cooing, picture-taking, and the removal of cat crap from the baby’s mouth. I had waited my whole life for nothing. I felt cheated, having spent years giving my sister and my older cousins a hearty laugh each and every time they’d look over and see all six feet of me sitting at a tiny plastic table with my knees in my armpits.

I never recovered from that, that odd display of myself in a role reserved for the second class. In high school once I volunteered to stand outside of a Wal-Mart and collect money for the Salvation Army. It occurred to me the second I was left alone there with my little red bucket that perhaps some of the customers would mistake me as being the needy recipient of their pocket change. I felt with each clanging of that bell that I was demanding that they look at me, "see what your capitalist society has done to me!" The way their eyes fell on me as they tossed pennies and chewed gum at me was the very stare I’d endured at that cursed Kiddie Table.

Whenever I find myself in a not-so-flattering situation I am instantly taken to that place in time where I sat in the shadow of my sister and older cousins, in a shamed and awkward silence eating my grandmother’s fried chicken.

And here I am, being drug by my ears towards thirty, and low and behold the Kiddie Table has presented itself to me in a sneaky new form: The Singles’ Table.

The Singles’ Table is the denouement in the series of events that make up a couples’ oppression of their fabulous, fashionable, in-shape single friends. The oppression starts with the invitation to whatever event in which you’ll find yourself parked between someone’s crazy neighbor who sobs uncontrollably and the creepy guy with no eyebrows who works with one of your hosts. It could be a wedding, a birthday party, a bar mitzvah, a housewarming, whatever. At some point in my life, and I’m not sure exactly when (perhaps I was out shopping or sleeping off a hangover), I stopped receiving invitations that said, "Tony Thompson and Guest." My couple friends suddenly became aware of a fact to which I’d been blind, that I’d never meet anyone. Thanks for letting me in on this! I’ve spent thousands of dollars on moisturizer and expensive shoes for nothing!

I learned years ago not to call my host and ask, "Well, would it be OK if I brought someone?" A pause for silence arises as my host works through their embarrassment for me, similar to the moment between the time my dad will ask me about his comb-over and the time that I tell him, "Great!" "Of course you can!" they finally blurt out, and I’m picturing them on the other end of the line with their faces twisted up in nervous discomfort.

A baby step towards the Singles’ Table is the dinner party. This is a chance for your couple friends to test your reserve and will, to see if you both deserve and/or could handle the Singles’ Table. At another point in my life in which I wasn’t paying attention (I might’ve been watching "That’s So Raven" or studying the ads in an "InStyle" magazine) my friends stopped trying to set me up at dinner parties. When I was younger, a dinner party was a chance for my couple friends to humiliate me by trying to set me up with the most revolting and backwards homosexual they could dig out of the dirt. I remember the first dinner party where I showed up for, well, just dinner. I kept looking under the table and over my shoulder all night for the set up. "OK, seriously, where is he? Did you hide him out back? Look, I’m about to make my ninth Vodka Tonic and the Valium’s about to kick in. If you want me to meet him and remember that I was even here in the first place you’d better drag him out now."

After successful humiliation at both types of dinner parties, the type where you meet someone horrible and the type where you don’t meet anyone at all, wherer you just sit there listening to people talk about daycare and tax preparations while in the back of your mind you wonder who’s gonna be on Letterman, then your hosts will deem you ready for the Singles’ Table. Basically, the Singles’ Table is the couple’s way of saying to you, "I trust that you can be miserable and feel awkward all on your own, without our supervision. Go forth, single freak, and be with your people."

If you’re lucky, as I was recently at a fabulous birthday party for a friend of mine, the Singles’ Table is actually the place to be. At this particular event we Singles made up about a quarter of the population. After exiting the buffet line and stopping by the bar to top of my wine, I glanced around the room at all the couples. There were couples of all kinds. Older couples, newlyweds, couples that recently had their first child, and even a few gay couples. And then there was the Singles’ Table. Except it wasn’t a doomed wasteland of a Singles’ Table as I’ve experienced before. There was no strange woman there eager to show me pictures of her cats or a man holding a cactus who looks like he came in off the street uninvited, only my partners in status, people strong enough to face this big scary world on their own, we of the "I’d rather pay my credit card bills alone than stumble across someone else’s turd in the toilet" type mentality. So we drank too much, talked about one-night stands and celebrities that we wanna bang. Instead of sitting there on display, a "This could’ve been you" example for all the couples to gawk at, we had the time of our lives. And I like to think that maybe some of the couples were jealous of us, for once. Because for the first time since I was a kid, I didn’t mind being at the Little Table. In fact, that was the only place I wanted to be.