When we arrived at the Grand Wailea, tipsy from our plane ride, we immediately wanted to check out the grounds. As we wandered around, we were both a little overwhelmed by how much of a “family” hotel it was. I mean, we knew that they had a kid-friendly pool to offset the adults-only pool, but I don’t think either of us realized that the kid-friendly pool was going to be a mini Disneyland. There were water slides and caves and big round plastic balls that kids could get inside—for what reason, I don’t know. I assumed it was so you couldn’t hear their screams, but it turned out that when they climbed inside of those plastic balls their screams were pretty much all you could hear.
“Thank God they have a separate pool for us,” Jen noted.
“Seriously!” I laughed. “This pool is a disaster.”
“Let’s go check out our pool area,” Jen suggested.
“It’s probably pretty far away so that you don’t even hear the noise from this area,” I screamed.
“You don’t have to scream. I mean, it is loud here but also I’m standing right next to you.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said, still screaming.
A waitress walked by and I stopped her to ask how to get to the adult pool.
“Um, just follow the arrows on the wooden signs,” she said in a bitchy tone.
“Oh, I didn’t see those,” I responded defensively.
“They’re everywhere,” she replied, even bitchier.
“Well, how about you just point to where we should go since you’re already standing here and it’s taken longer for you to tell us that there are signs we can follow than it would for you to just tell us where the pool is,” I shot back, with a huge smile on my face.
The waitress flopped her wrist in a general direction and stomped away, leaving Jen and me alone to diagnose her attitude.
“She’s probably hungover,” I offered.
“She’s probably in a bad mood because she has to work at the kids’ pool,” Jen retorted.
I decided Jen was correct, then we searched for the wooden sign to point us in the right direction because we assumed Angry Waitress was probably trying to send us to the wrong place on purpose (that may sound paranoid, but we were right).
The adults-only pool was just a few feet away from the kid-friendly pool, which at first had us concerned, but somehow the layout made it seem very serene. I mean, I could still hear the screams of the children running through the pool in plastic balls like panicked hamsters, but it was very, very faint.
We located two cushy lounge chairs and settled in for an afternoon of quietish comfort by the pool. We were immediately greeted by a waiter, who happily took our order and, minutes later, returned with two margaritas. Things were sailing along smoothly, with Jen and I flipping through Us Weekly, drinking and tweeting flattering photos of each other. I was just about to doze off when I heard a shrill sound coming from the throat of a girl who was clearly not yet eighteen, even though her squeal was definitely coming from inside the adults-only pool.
I shot up out of my lounge chair, only to see that Jen had already spotted the underage offender. “There, she’s right there.” Jen pointed.
I slid my sunglasses down my nose so I could get a good look at her, confirming that she was definitely not of age.
“She’s like twelve,” I noted, irritated.
“She’s not even a teenager yet,” Jen replied, “that’s for sure.”
“What the fuck is she doing over here? This is the adults-only pool!” I complained.
Just then we noticed that the tween interloper was not alone—the nonadult also had a few friends with her, all of whom were nonadults. We were being invaded!
“We need to do something about this,” Jen said in a determined voice.
As if on cue, a security guard passed by. Jen cleared her throat and summoned him over.
“Excuse me,” Jen said in her sweetest voice. “Do you see that girl over there?”
The security guard looked over to where we were both pointing. “Yes. What about her?”
“Well, she’s like twelve,” Jen explained. “And this is the adults-only pool.”
I nodded in agreement, unable to speak, due to the straw dangling from my mouth.
“Oh, right.” The security guard nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said as he walked away.
Jen and I watched in anticipation as he approached the girl and her friends, ready to see the preteen perps get bounced. But instead all we saw was the security guard walk in their general direction and then veer off to the right without saying a word to them.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked in astonishment as my straw came flying out of my mouth.
“I don’t know!”
A few minutes later, the security guard came passing by again and Jen stopped him, this time with a little less sweetness in her voice. “So did you ask those girls to leave the adults-only pool?”
“I did,” he lied.
“Oh, well that’s weird, because they’re still here,” Jen said.
“Huh,” he said in fake astonishment. “I’ll go talk to them again.”
Jen and I watched him like hawks as he meandered slowly in their direction. This time he did make it all the way to them, appeared to say something, then quickly walked away. We stared at the group of kids, waiting for them to run off to their designated pool area and respect the segregation that was so clearly noted by the hotel. Instead, they stayed put. They even started laughing loudly, as if whatever the security guard had said to them only made them more comfortable.
When the security guard passed by us again, he moved at a much quicker pace, clearly hoping to bypass us. No such luck, though: we were now on a mission.
“Excuse me!” Jen yelled, her voice now filled with such a strong mixture of sweet and sour it belonged on a Chinese food menu. “Security!? Hi. I couldn’t help but notice that those underage kids are still here.”
“Yes,” the security guard sighed. “They are. I asked them to leave, there isn’t much else I can do.”
“Oh? Okay,” Jen said in what appeared to be a relenting voice. But just as the security guard started to walk away, believing he was now off the hook with the two crazy ladies who wanted the kids to get the fuck out of their pool, Jen followed up with, “I mean, it’s your rule, not mine.”
The security guard stopped in his tracks, turning to look back at us, a blank look on his face.
“That’s right,” Jen continued, driving the knife in further. “It’s your rule they’re breaking, not mine.”
The security guard turned and walked away, and I proudly high-fived Jen: “Your rule, not mine,” I repeated, using my best Jen Kirkman impression. “You’re a genius.”
Jen laughed proudly, then noted it was weird that we’d just high-fived, and we both went back to reading our magazines.
Now, if you think that at some point the security guard stepped up and those kids were asked to leave, you’re wrong. We spent the rest of the afternoon tweeting the Grand Wailea (@GrandWailea in case you want to have your voice heard), calling the concierge, and just in general talking loudly about the parents of the kids who seemed to think it was cool to let their children shit all over our quiet adult pool time. There was never really a resolution to it, but halfway through the afternoon we went from flat-out annoyed to amused-annoyed and acknowledged to ourselves that we had become slightly obsessed with the situation. This day also happened to be my birthday, so eventually Jen and I left the lies of the adults-only pool behind to take “spontaneous” photos of each other frolicking in the ocean before heading to dinner at Maui’s famous Mama’s Fish House.
Mama’s Fish House was exactly what we were told it would be: a beautiful restaurant with a great view and wonderful food. We enjoyed amazing service and drank our weight in alcohol as we rang in my thirty-eighth year of life. Jen ordered
me some sort of chocolate dessert thing that they brought to the table with a single candle in it. When we left, we noticed a canoe on the sand right in front of the restaurant that was just begging for photo ops. So, obviously, we took turns posing in the canoe in varying positions so that we would both return home with hot new “just sitting in a canoe in the moonlight” photos that we could upload to Facebook.
(This trip took place just before Instagram became a thing—you know, back in the days when you had to work even harder to get the pose exactly right because there weren’t fifteen filter options for you to choose from in case something on your body was amiss. Jesus, social media makes being single so much more difficult. I never thought I’d miss Polaroids.)
We spent the next two days doing much of the same thing: lying by the pool, rolling our eyes at anyone who was clearly under the appropriate age to be by said pool, and sipping margaritas. There isn’t much of a nightlife in Maui; it all closes down very early for the most part, since it’s mostly couples who go there. But Jen and I didn’t let that get us down. One morning we ordered room service, which came while I was in the shower. When I got out, stoked to see pancakes, Jen was all ramped up about the person who brought our breakfast.
“They asked me if I was Ms. Colonna,” she said, annoyed.
“Oh, they thought you were me? That’s because the room is in my name.”
“I know that, but when I said I wasn’t you they were like, ‘Oh, sorry, wrong room,’ and I said, ‘No, this is the right room, I’m Ms. Kirkman, Ms. Colonna is just in the shower.’ ”
“Okay . . . ?”
“And then he looked at the one bed and was like, ‘I don’t understand,’ as if we are the first two women to share a hotel together in Maui.”
“I hate that! I hate that people think just because we share a bed we’re lesbians. I mean, look at Lucy and Ricky! They had separate twin beds and they were fucking!”
“I’m not sure that’s helpful in this argument,” Jen noted rationally.
“Oh, right, well you know what I meant.”
“I don’t but I do,” Jen said, confused but in solidarity.
“Anyway it’s just annoying that we can’t travel together and share a nice king bed without people assuming we’re lesbians. Plus, isn’t gay marriage legal here, so technically shouldn’t they just support us either way?”
“I don’t think it’s legal here yet but we can definitely come back when it is and see if we’re treated with more respect,” Jen offered.
Look, I understand that when a man sees two women in a hotel room sharing a king bed he wants to assume it’s because they’re going down on each other every night. But the reality—and I’m sorry to break the fantasy, guys—is that female platonic friends are comfortable sharing a king bed and usually prefer it because most hotel double beds are about as comfortable as a jail cot.
New Year’s Eve, Jen and I walked around fighting the gay rumors that we were sure were floating around about us (in reality, nobody was talking about us at all, gay or straight) and trying to plan what we would do that evening. After asking around, we determined that the place to be for dinner that night was the Four Seasons restaurant, which was within walking distance of our hotel and had an amazing view of the ocean.
“How romantic!” I laughed.
“Exactly, lover!” Jen laughed back as we looked around the adults-only pool for people who were pointing and whispering about us but only spotted a new crop of twelve-year-olds.
“Seriously, this place has a real problem with order,” Jen noted.
At around noon, I decided I’d better call the Four Seasons to reserve a table for our nonlesbian New Year’s Eve celebration. As you can imagine, since New Year’s was that night, they were all booked.
“Oh, no,” I said as I hung up the phone, “they’re full. They said we can’t even get a seat at the bar, it’s going to be so busy.”
“Call that sushi place the concierge told us about,” Jen suggested, “that’s fine with me.”
I called them, along with about ten other restaurants, only to get the same answer.
“Everything is booked,” I sighed, defeated.
Jen looked up from her computer, where she was drafting a complaint e-mail to the guest services division of the Grand Wailea about their horrible lack of rule enforcement at the adult pool. “What are we going to do? I guess we can just eat here?”
Later that evening, we got all gussied up, both of us silently doing our best to not look like lesbians (it was New Year’s Eve, after all), and headed down to the restaurant at the Grand Wailea, where we were told we would be given preferential treatment for dinner seating since we were staying there. When we walked in, we were blindsided by the amount of children in the restaurant. Again, I don’t have a beef with children, so don’t get all pissy with me here, but guess what? Two single ladies on the town on New Year’s Eve aren’t looking to spend it with families of six. Should two single ladies know better than to vacation in Maui during what is clearly a family holiday? Maybe. But that page on TripAdvisor never popped up and now we were there and we wanted to get hammered without the possibility of a baby seeing it all go down.
“Come on,” I said, determined.
“Where are we going?” Jen asked.
“Just follow me.”
We walked the pathway to the Four Seasons. When we arrived, it was like arriving at the gates of heaven. It was quiet, serene; the only real noise I heard was waves crashing and glasses clinking together to toast the New Year.
“But we don’t have a reservation,” Jen exclaimed as I headed up the walkway in my wedges, almost twisting my ankle at every turn.
“Shhhhhhh. Just follow me.”
When we approached the entrance, there was a man standing there, decked out in a suit and tie, a clipboard in his hand.
“Do you have a reservation?” he asked.
“We do,” I lied. “It’s under Sarah Colonna.”
He studied his clipboard and I looked over my shoulder at Jen, who gave me a “what the fuck” look before I turned back to the gentleman holding the future of our evening in his hands. “Sorry, I don’t see it on here,” he said, a tone of finality in his voice.
“You don’t see it on there?” I asked, incredulous. “I made the reservation weeks ago.”
“Spell your name for me again?”
“C-O-L-O-N-N-A,” I sighed. “Seriously, I called like three weeks ago. It’s New Year’s Eve . . . so obviously I called way in advance.”
He looked at his clipboard, back at us, back at his clipboard, then back at us for what seemed like twenty minutes but was probably twenty seconds.
“Well?” I asked impatiently as I looked over his shoulder at all the people in the restaurant who were totally our age and who seemed to be having a wonderful time.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have your name on here . . . I just don’t have a table for you . . .”
My lower lip started to quiver; I’m not sure whether it was on purpose or by accident.
“. . . so if you wouldn’t mind sitting at the bar for dinner, we can seat you right away. Those seats are supposed to be reserved as well, but clearly this is our mistake,” he offered.
“Clearly it is,” I said with a smile. “But I appreciate you figuring it out for us.”
“I appreciate it, too!” Jen yelled over my shoulder.
“No problem, happy New Year, ladies,” he said as he pulled the velvet rope aside and let us into paradise.
“He thinks we’re lesbians, too,” Jen whispered.
“But we’re lesbians with a nice place to eat on New Year’s Eve,” I noted.
“True. That was really impressive work out there. I can’t believe you got us in.”
“I know! I feel very proud.”
“It’s like we got into the adults-only po
ol when we weren’t supposed to!” Jen observed.
“It is! But with steak.”
We enjoyed a lovely evening of wine, appetizers, champagne, entrées, and more champagne. We noted that a couple of seats stayed empty all night, so we didn’t even feel the guilt of possibly taking someone else’s seats with our dirty lies. All in all, it was a successful evening.
When we got back to the Grand Wailea, most people were in bed. There was a fireworks show happening that neither of us gave a shit about, so we decided to go back to our room, order champagne, and ring in the New Year from our hotel balcony. When Jen called to order our cocktails, they immediately asked if she was “Ms. Colonna.”
“No, I am her lover,” Jen said, deadpan. “A bottle of chilled champagne and two glasses, please.”
Blind-Drunk Date
After I took a pretty long hiatus from dating, one of my friends, Renee, suggested I go out with one of her boyfriend’s coworkers. His name was Mike—he and I had actually gone out a couple of times a few years prior, during one of the “breaks” Ryan and I took before moving in together. I kind of wondered, now that I was single, what Mike was up to, but I never bothered to text him or anything, just assuming he had a girlfriend by now. Plus, that whole “recycle” thing hadn’t really worked out for me last time. But Mike was cute, had a good job and a nice house, and he liked to cook. I’m reasonably good-looking, have a good job, enjoy nice houses, and love to eat. Why not give this a shot?
Renee suggested that before committing to another date with Mike—she reminded me that the first time we tried to date, he got a little weird about my not having enough free time for him—I should go with her to his birthday party at his house.
“This way, there are a bunch of other people around, including me, so if you aren’t feeling interested in him anymore, we can just leave early and you’ll save yourself a Friday night down the road,” she explained.
Has Anyone Seen My Pants? Page 11