Last night I took a short break from everything to celebrate Kate’s birthday at Madame K’s, a popular pizza joint in Ballard. I had no clue about this place (but it’s not surprising I wouldn’t know anything about Ballard, because you can’t get to Ballard from Cap Hill.) Earlier in the week, when Kate sent out the invite, I thought the reference to Madame K’s indicated the party would be at her house. Somehow, I also inferred that we were to bring food that we’d made, which pretty much means I failed the whole reading comprehension thing with that message. Anyway, it was a good thing I called her yesterday for some other reason; otherwise, I would’ve been baying at her window and wondering where the party went.

Yeah, so the description of Madame K’s that I found appealed to my hedonistic tendencies: It featured kick-ass pizza, deep-red walls, and a bed above the bar.

It was a good chance to whip out my favorite word: incarnadine. As a noun it describes my favorite color—blood red. As a verb it’s a kick-ass way to say "to redden."

"The walls are incarnadined with the legends of foul trysts."

So Madame K’s was a happening place. Lots of hipsters and also scads of Freds and Barneys.

(I had a rearview-mirror epiphany yesterday: Stuck in traffic I saw in the truck behind me a guy with a goatee glued to his chin who was chatting with his blonde (not kit) girlfriend. The guy was your run-of-the-mill clean-cut dude, the kind of guy you see populating the white-collar workforce these days. You know the type: They want to look a little hip so they grow a goatee, but everything else says Everyman. Indeed that trimmingly oval goatee accessory has become so common that it says everyman everyway. And it suddenly occurred to me that all those guys look just like Fred Flintstone. The blonde version is a Barney. It’s true—it generalizes! Go see for yourself.

There’s also the long sideburn variation. Even though neither Fred nor Barney have sideburns, these guys still look like Freds and Barneys.

And what’s up with that funny rectilinear goatee some people are wearing? The one that someone said looks like a squished caterpillar? The Brazilian goatee?)

I got to meet more of Kate’s friends and we all ate pizza, which was awesome. I have been thinking about how cool it was for a bunch of women and one Andrew to have a pizza birthday party where we all ate much, and much fat, and said it was good, yeah, but otherwise we talked about other stuff. It’s too easy to imagine an alternative party where the food would be delicately prepared and small-portioned. We’d have to talk about each ingredient and then complain about how full we were. I’ve attended too many of those.

But Kate's just about living: She's as authentic a person as they come, and there's an ease that surrounds a person like that. It makes stark how all the insecurities form pretensions that won't let us be ourselves or see each other through.

Kate was queen for the night, and she was rightly Elizabethan in the getup.