Even Stephanie

Tonight David and I went out and spent a few dollars and by a few dollars I mean many dollars. We went out for a fancy schmancy dinner at Wild Fire, a place at which, if you don't have reservations, you will always end up waiting a minimum of an hour and a half for a table. It's that yummy. Wild Fire is located at the fancy schmancy mall, Oak Brook, so dinner led to a fab pair of linen capris at Anthropologie, then a makeup-buying extravaganza at M.A.C., where David was briefly transformed into someone I've never met before. I think he became an incarnation of Max Factor or Mr. Revlon or someone because he began suggesting things like mascara, eye shadow, and lively shades of lipstick I haven't worn since I was in my 20s. Notice that I am avoiding alternate speculations of why he was so encouraging in the makeup store; I prefer to think that he was just in the mood to pamper me and that's the story I'm sticking with.

Anyway, he suggested we go to the casino and I agreed. It's something we rarely do and it sounded better than the movie we had planned on seeing, which was, ironically, "21." Off we went to Aurora to the Hollywood Casino, a place with walls covered in photos of showgirls, old-time leading men, and women with dark lipstick, rolled hair, and fur stoles. The Big Spenders, David and I, sat down at the 2-cent slots; the planets were perfectly aligned, our little corner of the room was a cosmos and my 2 cents ended up winning hundreds of dollars!

Since the nice man at the machine next to me had kindly helped me to figure out what in the world all the numbers and symbols appearing before me meant, I offered to buy him a drink in return for the advice; he politely declined and got up and left dejectedly. That's usually what I do when I go to the casino, but this time I struck it rich.