Foreign Diplomacy

I received an interesting phone call from an old friend last night. We grew up together in Los Angeles. Dude is quite a character. Combine Larry David’s bluntness and lack and of tact with Will Ferrell’s physical demeanor and haplessness, and you’ve got an idea of the fellow I am talking about. Bad luck and worse judgment have frequently rendered him the victim of extraordinary circumstances. He stumbles into the kind of escalating pandemonium that no sensible person would ever have to face.

I could literally tell you thousands of ridiculous stories about this guy. I’ll dangle a short yarn, for background. In his early twenties, late one lonely night, my husky Jewish pal found himself wandering into an East Hollywood massage parlor. This was no day spa. No clients came in hoping to be wrapped in seaweed with cucumbers placed gently over their eyes. Upon being buzzed in through a steel door, customers were made to look into a video camera and recite: “I am not a law enforcement officer.”



After confirming he was not wearing a wire, my friend insisted that he receive services from a Japanese masseuse. Eventually, following some bickering, the madam of the house told him that he would indeed be serviced by “a girl straight from Tokyo.” Instead, he was met at the massage table by a woman who was clearly not Asian, with a distinctly Mexican accent, wearing heavy eye makeup in an apparent effort to appear Japanese. The situation deteriorated rapidly from there. Suffice to say that his evening did not have a happy ending.

So last night, my friend told me about a conversation he recently had with his wife. The two of them had fallen into a spontaneous serious heart-to-heart talk. They spoke about their family together (two kids), career ambitions, and life in general, over multiple glasses of wine. Well into this dialogue, she nonchalantly throws out: “If you could change one thing about me, what would it be?” At first he wisely resists the question, but his wife eventually breaks him with, “I promise I won’t be mad at whatever you say. Just be honest.”

Now at this point any reasonable man would give a pat answer like: ‘I would make you less attractive because you are so incredibly beautiful that I can’t stop thinking about you all day and it distracts me at work.’ But instead, my forthright friend looks his wife in the eye and says, with sincerity, “If I could change one thing about you I’d make you Asian.”

His wife, who is in fact blonde and very fair-skinned, flips out. And in response to her fury, my old pal shrugs and says, “I was just being honest.” Un-fucking-believable.

Oh yeah, one other thing, they currently have a teenage Thai au pair living with them. No shit.

I don’t know exactly how to articulate the moral of this story. I do know, however, what holiday gift I’ll be giving my friend and his wife this year—his and hers kimonos.