Famous People #52: Weekend at Ruby's
Kaitlyn: Another miracle of Gchat group travel planning, this year’s fall trip was to a town that had (1) farm festival, (1) winery, (1) haunted church tour and 100,000 canvas prints from Pier 1 Imports, all hanging up in our personal “ranch house” at the corner of Sheep Pasture Road and Old Town Road (yes!). My favorite was a “painting” of a baby tiger looking down at his reflection in a puddle of water and seeing a full grown tiger. My second favorite was four Eiffel towers.
Lizzie: We realized in one of our 32 Lyft rides subsidized by Ashley’s access to a seemingly infinite promotion that this was our 4th Annual Fall Trip. The only other things I’ve done annually for four years is high school, college, and pap smears.
We can’t miss a fall trip now, it’s too important. In just four years, we’ve created a dangerous, nearly untenable situation in which we must either continue the tradition forever or else risk the dissolution of the friendship. Unfortunately, in what may have been meant as a warning, Kaitlyn offhandedly mentioned the possibility of us all having a major fall out in the future.
Well, we were originally planning on going to the Hamptons or the Berkshires, but everything was out of our price range as three working women with a lot of weddings to go to this year. We ended up getting a last-minute deal of a lifetime on an Airbnb in Stony Brook, Long Island. The listing promised a cozy home with a rabbit in the basement and no cable or WiFi or entertainment of any kind.
Kaitlyn: As soon as we arrived, we waited 15 to 20 minutes for the teenager who was cleaning the bathrooms to leave, then we unlocked the basement door, snuck down there in a single file line, past a giant whiteboard with a month’s worth of an absolutely insane workout routine outlined on it (on the first day you do a 30-second plank and on the 30th day you do a 10-minute plank? Get real!) and over to a large pen, with a fence about the height of a baby gate, which did not seem nearly tall enough.
I was in front, and I don’t know how it happened. I’m not a leader by nature, as you know, and I’m also not even particularly curious about the world around me, so who can say. I rounded the corner of the pen and peered into a half-eaten cardboard box, which is where I looked directly into the red eyes of a 30-pound white rabbit. “No,” I explained to Ashley and Lizzie as I walked quickly but calmly back toward the psychotic gym area (5 push-ups on day one and 100 push-ups on day 30??). “I don’t like her,” I said, I think firmly enough for them to comprehend. Nobody listened to me. On the whiteboard, I pointed out to no one, there was also a reminder to attend a screening of Avengers: Endgame, which made it seem like nobody had been downstairs in months, maybe for a specific reason... I may as well have been writing the words in the air with my finger, and facing into the corner like a Blair Witch kid. Ashley and Lizzie walked over the box and looked inside and cooed like they were looking at their own newborn children. They loved the rabbit. Her name was Ruby and they talked about her constantly for the rest of the trip.
Lizzie: Airbnb should actually pay us for wanting to stay in a rabbit’s bachelor pad in the middle of nowhere so badly. The house was everything we ever wanted and more. The fridge was full of carrots. Ashley was a little scared because I had to kill a giant cricket in the living room basically as soon as we got there and it brought up some cricket trauma from her past. She also didn’t like the fuzzy blanket on the bed we all planned to sleep in. Kaitlyn said something genius, which was, possibly paraphrased: “I think you’re mistaking aesthetic displeasure for fear.” It really resonated with me, because this is exactly what happens to me with Mr. Bean!
After a brief tour of our aesthetically challenged home, we headed out to a harvest festival at a local farm. As far as I can tell, farm living is exactly like they say it is in the movies.
Kaitlyn: Yes, with Ruby on our minds, we went to a farm called Benner’s Farm, and looked at goats, pigs, chickens, you name it. Ashley was particularly infatuated with the first pig we saw, but then we saw a much larger pig and she didn’t even care about the other one anymore. We paid $1 each for a haunted hayride with very little hay (it was more like a wooden bench ride) and very many hauntings—the tractor driver, who was perhaps 60, started the ride saying, “My dad put up a bunch of figures in the woods. At the end, tell me which is your favorite.” At the end, most of the parents with young children were like… “We liked the pumpkins?” The “figures” were all more terrifying than I can possibly describe, but I’ll give you a taste: In one scenario there was a 20-foot tall spider web strung across several trees, full of body-sized “bodies” wrapped up in spider stuff, with only their pumpkin or demon mask faces showing. Many of the figures had yellow, spindly fingers with mutated, swollen fingertips, but we couldn’t figure out what they were made of.
Um, anyway, we posed in a ply-wood cut out so our faces were replacing three peas in “peas in a pod!” Then we bought $2 dixie cup coffees from a teen girl in a cozy-looking hoodie, who yelled at a teen boy in a cozy-looking hoodie because he spilled water on a power strip and almost killed them all. I became emotional, obviously, listening to them bicker — I loved being that young! It was still hilarious to call a boy you liked a “butthole.” You could think about your crush all day long. You had no responsibilities other than helping him stay alive!
To remind us (me) that we’re adults now—with debit cards, and nice sweaters, and at least a couple romantic prospects among us that know better than to drench their electronics—we set off to get drunk at a vineyard on the side of some body of water.
Lizzie: The wines of Long Island are among the worst I’ve ever put in my mouth, but at least we were also in Long Island. Some men in flip flops bought a bottle of the red that tasted like melted plastic (I think it was a 2016 vintage) and made disgusted faces as soon as they drank it. They were right to be disgusted, but they were wrong to have blind-purchased an entire bottle from the winery, which did offer tastings for a sum of money some might consider overly confident.
Kaitlyn: It’s true. I don’t believe in Yelp reviews or diminishing the work of small business owners but tasting four wines at Harmony Vineyards in St. James, New York costs $21? And each wine is scarier than the last. We started out with what tasted like a gas station Chardonnay — okay fine! We’re not even snobs! But as we descended into various reds, we started noticing something odd: “notes of banana,” “notes of caramel swirled with cherry and garlic,” “notes of lilac laundry detergent.” I’m joking about the last one and the second-to-last one, but literally it said “notes of banana” on the laminated card. Banana! This was the most disgusting wine anyone has ever tasted or will ever taste. When I think of how it may have been made I see a man throwing stray pieces of licorice and a bottle of acetone into one of those huge Gatorade water coolers and then pausing, “Oh, grapes!”
Lizzie: Because part of the fun of fall trip is packing as many activities as we can into what is largely considered to be a single Saturday in October, we went right from the horrors of Long Island wine to the horrors of the local historical society’s graveyard tour. We paid more than you might expect to see members of the historical society dressed in their finest period attire, doing impressions of historically significant (and dead) past locals.
Some volunteer actors stumbled over their lines so clumsily, I was forced to stare into the ground until I started seeing through the grass to the actual dead people. Our tour guide also didn’t know the route she was supposed to take us in, and we kept getting lost. It was during one of these unplanned detours that Kaitlyn said something like, “I keep wondering what kind of huge fight we’ll get into that’ll finally put an end to this whole friendship thing.”
Kaitlyn: I was just protecting myself. This tour was incredibly long, it was all about seemingly randomly chosen people who grew up on Long Island, it was not scary at all, and I felt like Lizzie and Ashley may have resented me for finding the East Setauket Facebook events page and suggesting that we waddle through a freezing tour of two different Protestant churches at which apparently several Confederate sympathizers are buried and nobody thinks it’s a problem to dress up as them and tell their charming life stories at a modern-day fundraiser. Things got even worse once a woman on the tour took it upon herself to shine an LED flashlight directly into Lizzie’s face for several minutes at a time, whenever she least expected it. On the bright side (haha), a couple of the stories were, if not exactly scary, at least deeply fucked up. One of the ghosts told us about how she rescued her alcoholic boyfriend from a boat incident on Christmas Eve and, rather than risking social judgment by taking him back to her normal house, went with him to his drunken bum shack, which is where they “spent the night” wrapped in her shawl and then woke up dead. They froze to death!
So, at this point, Ashley selected a restaurant for us called Pasta Pasta.
Lizzie: Pasta Pasta surprised us all with its stunning decor and its massive portion size. You should definitely go if you ever get the chance. I think it’s a chain. In the end, Pasta Pasta and the Stony Brook Winery really did us a solid by feeding us so many carbs and so much poison wine that we were all able to sleep soundly that night in our haunted rabbit cottage.
Kaitlyn: I don’t remember anything about Pasta Pasta other than the fact that there were beta fish all over the place, in every vase. There were also pink Christmas lights on every surface because it was breast cancer awareness month. We ate at least four pounds of calamari, plus garlic bread, plus pastas of all shapes and sizes, along with a bottle of wine I forced Lizzie to select since everything that had gone wrong during the rest of the day-long trip had been pretty obviously my fault. We slept three peas in a pod in a California King, and we’ll never know exactly where Ruby slept. She could have been anywhere : )
PARTY REVIEW METRICS:
Did anyone bring a dog?
Lizzie: Who needs a dog when you have Ruby?
Kaitlyn: See what I mean? She’s obsessed with Ruby! There were a lot of dogs at Benner’s Farm, but we didn’t have time to look at them because Ashley only wanted to hear facts about the 615-pound hog and I only wanted to watch the teenagers interact with each other. There were also dogs at Harmony Vineyards, which would normally have made Lizzie pretty happy, but she was distracted by how much she hated a man with an acoustic guitar who was positively screaming “Mr. Brightside” at us in the middle of the afternoon, and by wrapping her little fist around the tasting glasses, crushing them to powder one at a time.
Did we hear any good secrets?
Lizzie: Before we fell asleep in our single bird’s nest of a bed, Kaitlyn said we should share secrets. She went first, and then we fell asleep.
Kaitlyn: The next day I went on a date in an oyster bar and started to complain about this behavior on Ash and Liz’s parts, but then my date said “What was the secret?” And I was like, oh, this is how they’re going to get away with it. I’m never going to bring it up again because I never want to remind them of what I said. I hope they forget to read this newsletter!
Did anyone get engaged?
Lizzie: We’re engaged in a pact of having a big falling out one year from now.
Kaitlyn: Imagine if you were proposed to in the “VIP” gazebo at Harmony Vineyards. It would be so easy to do a spit-take because you would absolutely hate what was in your mouth!
Did anyone get famous?
Lizzie: We never do!
Kaitlyn: Well, the guitar guy also played “Shallow,” a song from a famous movie about getting famous. My mouth was full of snow cone syrup and apple cider vinegar, so it was pretty easy for me to start crying again, thinking about his dreams.
PARTY SCORE:
Lizzie: Already nostalgic for the random hairs on our Airbnb sink.
Kaitlyn: The odds of a fifth fall trip have never been higher. Unless we have a big falling out.