Battle planning from the Red Hat Ladies

I’m sitting in a cozy little northern Wisconsin coffee shop right now while Kim gets ready for a job interview. It’s everything you might expect a cozy little northern Wisconsin coffee shop to be. Faux stone fireplace, a dozen small dark wood tables, a couple fat chairs and plush couch, plenty of knotty pine, unobtrusive and uninteresting music playing in the background. It would also be as quiet as a library, with only two other people tapping laptop keyboards, were it not for the three older women from Chicago sitting behind me.

They’re artsy fartsies and are talking as boisterously as well-to-do older artsy fartsy women from Chicago often seem to do. They’re talking about what’s coming up in the art scene in Chicago and about planning to meet one another for a day of art walking and girl talk. The loudest gal, clearly the leader of the trio, gets on her cell to see about rooms for others ostensibly in their gang but not here with these three. She keeps mentioning Buckingham, either the fountain or the pricey condo in Chicago, but the speed with which she speaks and the way she says it the first few times makes me think she’s cursing (“We’ll meet at the f**king hum and then head to such-and-such gallery. No, no, otherwise it’s over $400 a night. All of us at the f**king hum. First Mattise, then the f**king hum, then to the outsider art exhibit.”).

My ears perk up at the outsider reference, since that was my primary field of graduate study. So I turn around and ask them about it. We speak for a minute or two and I wish them a good time on their field trip. Listening to these gals makes me smile. They’re completely oblivious to everyone else in the cafe and are conducting their little meeting with all the seriousness of Patton, Bradley and Montgomery planning a battle in WWII.

The coffee I’m drinking, on the other hand, does not make me smile. It’s a Kenyan supposedly roasted at a medium roast level. But it tastes like it’s a very weak medium roast, with a grassy sweet/sour flavor. I just finished my cup, am licking the inside of my mouth clean of the sourness, and am going for the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe next.