Wine and Wipes

Our hands were too disgusting to take photos,
so here's a photo of our kids inside something
that sort of looks like a crab.

You've all seen fancy fundraising galas (at least in the movies) where dinners are served by white-gloved waitstaff and folks spend exorbitant amounts on silly auction items like sea lion rides or original paintings of sad clowns by Brittney Spears.  Scott Valley has those types of dinners, only different.  From September to May (non-haying season) you could likely attend some sort of annual fundraising banquet every week.  Every event tries to have its own unique twist, but they always include at least two of the following three items: a dessert auction, a gun raffle, and a silent auction.  The fancy ones have all three.

Last weekend we lucked out and Regina got us tickets to the Ft. Jones Masons' annual crab feed.  Sound fancy?  It's not.  You get a paper plate loaded with crab and a plastic bib.  Sound awesome?  It is.  It's only the second time we've been able to score tickets because they're so coveted.  The first time was BC (before-children) and we screwed up by showing up somewhere between the two very strict start times.  They were kind and fed us anyway, but we'd broken some sort of crab-feed taboo and I was sure we'd be black-listed forever.  Twelve years later, we made it back on the cool bus and we weren't about to screw things up.

The Masons, for reasons that are unclear to me, serve an all you can eat crab feast that also includes "classic" crab side dishes: spaghetti, hard boiled eggs, garlic bread, and salad.  Everyone around us kept raving about the spaghetti and told me I had to try it.  It tasted like spaghetti.  At a crab feed.  Why in the hell would I fill my gut on spaghetti when I have crab legs to crack?  I asked that and was met with funny looks.  The egg, by the way, was delicious, but then again, I'm still new to this.

We arrived mostly prepared: we brought baby wipes and wine.  The wine, of course, we drank, but the wipes were a hit.  I think everyone in the hall came by at some point and sheepishly asked for one.  I felt like we gained a little street cred.  I thought our fundraiser dinner game was pretty top shelf, especially with the baby wipes and all, until I looked around.  People brought more than one wine variety (I guess one for the crab, one for the spaghetti), melted butter dipping pots, homemade cocktail sauces, and even linens.  It gives us something to which to aspire.  Next year, Dylan will macramé us our own crab bibs and Regina will fire up an appetizer hibachi in the corner.  Grady and I will up our crab cracking game and we'll be the envy of the hall.