I'm Not Bougie

When I first moved to NYC, I really thought I was doing something… I had my first job, my first apartment and in my head I imagined that my neighbors and I would be like the Harlem version of ‘Friends’ and my social life would resemble ‘Sex in the City.’ As naïve as I was, I was fortunate enough to have some normal and friendly neighbors, but I learned quickly that my door wasn’t going to be left unlocked and that we wouldn’t be cooking any dinners together. As for the social life part, I was pretty much right on, but I digress… So I had spent my first few paychecks traveling, shopping and just kicking it, but then my mother said she was going to be in New York on a business trip and wanted to stay with me instead of in a hotel so we could spend some quality time together. It was at that point that I realized I had to get my apartment in order… I had been sleeping on a pallet on the floor amongst my designer bags and shoes because I was too lazy to buy a bed – besides, who wants to spend $2,000 on a bed when you can buy a Louie? (obviously I was misguided in my early 20’s). So I went out, got a bed (I was able to talk the guy down by $400 AND get the delivery fee waived – woop! woop!), went to Crate & Barrel and pretty much furnished my apartment in a day.

Mom already said that she didn’t want to go out for dinner so I went downtown and got her favorite meal from her favorite gourmet Chinese restaurant, then I went to the liquor store – and people, this is where I went wrong – My mom is somewhat of a wine connoisseur and I figured I would impress her and show her how GROWN I was by having some wine for us to drink with dinner… *pause* … yeah… *pause* … So I go around the corner to the liquor store and I ask the guy where the wine is and if there’s a good one he could suggest (visualize me asking this of a guy who works behind plexiglass – naïve, I know). So he points me towards a fridge and says, “Our strawberry wine is really popular.” This is where I should have turned around and went home, but instead, I go check it out because I’ve never heard of strawberry wine and since I wasn’t much of a drinker back then (we know that’s not the case now!) I assumed that this strawberry wine was something exotic that I hadn’t been exposed to in my short 21 years of life. So I check out the bottle and there’s a big orange sticker that reads, “2 for $5.” This was another point in which I should have given up my plan to impress, but I was a shiny faced, recent college grad with very little money who needed to impress my mother with my maturity and my deep knowledge of grapes so all I could think was, “Wow! I can get TWO bottles for only $5! That’s better than the Arbor Mist we used to drink in college.” So I bought my wine and went home to wait for my Mom to get there.

So my Mom arrives – she loved my cute little apartment and loved how I decorated it (win!). As I prepared our plates, I’m in the kitchen telling her I also picked up a bottle of wine (it sounded so cool to say at the time) and I poured her a BIG glass and brought it to her. She looked at it a little funny, (and this is where I should have aborted the mission) but probably just assumed my pink wine was some form of “blush” (yeah, not so much). She didn’t really sip it and it wasn’t quite a mouthful, but she drank enough to spit it back out and looked at me incredulously and said, “What the hell is THIS!?” (note: My Mom doesn’t curse) I said, “It’s strawberry wine!” and then she said, “What the hell is strawberry wine?” I was so flustered by her cursing and confused about what was wrong with the wine that I said, “I don’t know! I got it from the liquor store around the corner.” (should have kept that part to myself) She then gave me the tiiight sideeye and told me to bring her the bottle. I wasn’t smart enough to remove the big orange sticker that read, “2 for $5” before I handed it to her, but that didn’t matter because she was really just concerned with the label because she damn near yells, “BOONE’S FARM?!? You gave me BOONE’S FARM!?!” I’m scared at this point and I said, “What’s Boone’s Farm?” and she’s like, “It’s what the winos used to drink when I was a kid – see, 2 for $5? Straight wino.” As she went to the kitchen and poured both bottles down the sink, she began to laugh uncontrollably-to the point of bringing herself to tears. Needless to say, I was embarrassed and quickly poured her a replacement glass of water – no lie, she barely made it through our meal because she was laughing so hard. It’s been a couple of years since then and every once in awhile when I break out some wine, she says, “It’s not Boone’s Farm, is it?” and then starts to chuckle to herself.