I submitted this story as an excuse for my failure to show up at the Tupes concert at Wellesley this weekend. No one believed it for even one second.

It happened one cold, dark, upstate New York evening. RM and I were driving up the NYS Thruway in the Jeep, back to Smallbany from a wild barn keggar (yes, this is what we do in upstate New York). I was woozy from Jello shots, RM was woozy from (sober) exhaustion and we were both looking forward to crashing the f-- out. It seemed like we were well on our way to this goal when the lights went out somewhere outside of Woodstock...

The only light left to guide us was the devilish red glow of the check engine light we'd been ignoring since we left for the party earlier that day--in the sun-lit parking lot of the Mobil, there was no sign of malfunction under the hood, so we took off down the Hudson, happily munching zingers and beef jerky.

Flash forward several hours, zingers and jerky well-digested, headlights and heat off, we were speeding down a deserted state road praying to find a sign of life. A speeding automobile almost knocked us off the road, unable to see us ahead without lights.

Salvation came in the form of a run-down roadside motel (think Identity, starring John Cusack) abutting what appeared to be a sleazy-looking diner.

Concerned with appearances, we weren't. Concerned with freezing to death in the middle of nowhere, we most certainly were. And it didn't take more than ten minutes to realize we were completely f-ed. The car battery was dead and we couldn't call AAA because I didn't have my card and RM doesn't have a membership. No gas stations for miles in either direction.

We couldn't call our fellow party-goers to save us, as they were either lying passed out in pools of their own vomit, or locked inside their own cars without keys.

We couldn't call my parents, who were trying to break into their own house after locking themselves out of it for the first time in twenty-six years. My father had to climb a ladder hoping to find a second-floor window unlocked. I had given him the idea--when we were kids and forgot our keys after the bus dropped us off from school, I used to climb up the side of the house and slip in through my brother's never-locked window.

We ultimately had to call RM's parents, who selflessly dropped everything they were doing to drive an hour down the thruway to come to our rescue. But in the time being, our numbing appendages forced us to seek solace inside the diner.

Which turned out not to be anything resembling a diner. It was, in actuality, a classy Italian restaurant. We were the only ones there, save the old Sicilian man who owned the place and his two GORGEOUS olive-skinned sons. The old man didn't speak a lick of English--I explained our situation to him in my somewhat lapsed Italian. After a conversation that reminded me how much I need to practice the language I have long studied, he left us alone in the restaurant with the sons.

Me, my boyfriend and two HOT Italian men alone for two hours in a sweet-smelling Italian restuarant chatting away and listening to Ray Charles. Quite the opposite of freezing to death.

Nuff' said.

But there is more...when the fam arrived with a new battery, the three menfolk went outside and proceeded to install the battery...ain't nothing like watching guys work on a car...

But I digress. To make a long and probably pointless story short, the new battery sufficed to get us home. And the next morning when I went to start up my own car, I came face to face with the orange indicator malfunction light. First time ever, and I couldn't find a thing wrong with it. So now I'm driving around in my parents car (license plate reads "Web Mom")...


Do you think that's a good enough excuse for not being able to drive out to Boston?