the blACK out gossip circle
“You hooked up with someone last night,” he said to
her, hoping to instigate a response. “Really? Who?” she
asked, bewildered and a little scared. “I don’t know,”
he said. “I can’t even remember who told me, but
apparently you did.”
The blACK out gossip circle. We’re all a part of it.
We’re worse than Us Weekly and Star magazines. We sit
together at the Hen House for hangover French toast
and bacon eating contests while recapping the previous
night’s events with laughter at other people’s
expense. It’s a wildfire conversation of who kissed
whom, who slept where, and who didn’t come home at
all.
Someone is always the center of the gossip. The girl
who drank too much champagne and was dancing like an
idiot on stage at the Box. The guy who tackled his
best friend and broke the bouncer’s ankle. The couple
who had recently broken up for the twentieth time, and
how the ex boyfriend is on a female warpath. The
bartender who was drunker than the patrons. Or the
after party that was as blurry to everyone as a
foggy Nantucket morning.
All you can do is hope that someone was worse than
you. That someone else made a way worse decision than
you did. That there was one other person on this tiny
drinking island that made a bigger jackass out of
himself than you did.
Because at the end of that Saturday morning brunch,
you don’t want to still be the center of conversation
for the blACK out crew’s gossip dinner.
Previous blACk book Columns:
Welcome to Never Never Land
Rookie on the Rock
The Catch
Holly Finigan writes a weekly column on life as a single woman on Nantucket. Holly graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2005 with a bachelors in journalism, which has so far turned out to be a career in bartending. She has spent the past four summers working at various Nantucket restaurants, travelling during the off-season to the U.S. Virgin Islands and New Zealand. She can be found galivanting around town with her girlfriends, or you can email her at hollyfinigan@yahoo.com.
