wine and cheap perfume

While I was in London with my parents, my mother took it upon herself to speak to everyone we encountered with a thick, phony English accent. One of the last mornings we were there, my dad and I were sitting at breakfast and the waitress came over. "Can I get you something to drink?" she asked.
"Three coffees, please!" my mother piped up, in what sounded like a cross between the women from Absolutely Fabulous and a drunk sorority girl from Jersey who was trying to impersonate them. The waitress averted her eyes and crept away, horrified. My dad started laughing. "Susan! Why do you keep doing that?!"
"Doing what?" my mom asked.
"Speaking in that ridiculous voice!" he replied.
My mother's lips tightened, as they always do when anyone calls her on her ridiculous antics when speaking to foreigners. "MAYBE because they UNDERSTAND ME BETTER that way!" she roared, her face beet red as she tore into another piece of oily Canadian bacon.
This is funny for about seventy-five different reasons, the first and most obvious one being that she genuinely believes this to be true. Imagine if Turks came to New York and with a heavy Turkish accent said things like, "Eh! Fuggedabouditt! Gimme a bagel wif da cream cheeeez!" You'd be like, actually, no.
What else? I went to a party called "Popstarz" with Stephen and James, sort of a Misshapes-wannabe gathering packed with young, bi-curious goths sucking nitrous out of colored balloons and smoking cigarettes in small, self-conscious clusters.
We danced like geese in heat to a bevy of supremely mediocre songs (I think Sean Paul's "Temperature" played seven consecutive times before finally surrendering to Gwen Stefani's cover of that classic mid-nineties dance hit "Murder She Wrote"). I wandered around in the rain a lot. Not in a soul-searching, poetic kind of way, but in a constantly-lost-and-broke kind of way. The last night I was there I decided to stay with my parents at their hotel again, but after learning that the hotel charged a astronomical amount of poundage to rent a cot, I asked my mom if I could just sleep in their king-sized bed with them. We'd only be sleeping for about five hours anyway, cause we were leaving for the airport so early the next morning. A look of mild repulsion settled on my mom's face. "I don't know," she answered cautiously, looking from me to the bed to my dad. "Don't you think that might be kind of weird?"
"Mom!" I shrieked. "ARE YOU KIDDING?! What, do you think I'm gonna try something? Do you think I'm going to try to lure you and dad into a threesome? Ew! The bed is the size of a football field!"
It reminded me of the time when my mother approached my sister's room when she was like, fifteen, to ask her to clean it, and as soon as she made in through the door my sister shouted, "MOM! GET OUT! I'M NOT GONNA HOOK UP WITH YOU!" Obviously she was kidding, but it was one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
I'm still trying to decide how weird it is to ask a person sitting next to you on the plane who you don't know if you can eat their lunch. On the ride back, the woman sitting beside me ordered a vegetarian meal, which she barely touched. As the flight attendent came over to clear her plate, I asked I could have her still-sealed fruit salad. She looked at me as though I tried to blow my nose on her shirt and nodded slowly, clearly horrified. Fuck her. I ate it and loved it.