Dinner and Dancing?

I was on the website for the Rainbow Room the other day after watching Sleepless in Seattle. You know the scene where Meg Ryan and Bill Pullman are having dinner and you can see the Empire State Building in the background? It's the Rainbow Room. A restaurant in the sky that apparently has both dinner and dancing on Friday/Saturday nights. They have a big band on those nights and play things that grown ups can dance to, and look classy at the same time. If there's dipping involved, it's classy right?

So for some reason I had this idea that our holiday party on Saturday would be the same thing. It was casino night and we were to be served hors d'ouerves with a open beer/wine bar. Aaron and I were both excited about it and thought we were going to be treated to a night of class (albeit the class that involves faux gambling).

We arrived at 7:45 at the Hyatt Regency after spending 20 minutes in line to pay for parking. Incidentally, the parking was $7 and not $5 (listed on the invitation) which was causing some ruckus from our cheaper colleagues. I'm sure there will be complaints to the social committee on Monday.

The ballroom was half filled with gambling tables and the other half had seating and a dancefloor. We were both looking rather hot. I had help with some spanx and Aaron always looks good in a suit. After a glass of cab and a bite of a unidentifiabley stuffed quesadilla, we decided to hit the tables.

Apparently gambling is not fun when you're not winning or losing real money. We tried roulette and then tried to go for broke 20 times at the blackjack table in the hopes of losing our plastic coins. The dealer was so bored, she kept pretending she busted to get us to stay.

All the while, I was waiting for the grown up dancing to begin, but I guess these days office parties are not complete without having to watch directors shake their junk-in-the-trunk to Beyonce. Seriously? When the second song they played was "Wild Thang" (not the version from Major League), I knew my dreams of a once classy night had been obliterated. We talked to some co-workers and Aaron's boss and then decided we just needed to go. They didn't even have a photographer to take our prom picture, which was also very disappointing.

So, back to the whole "dancing" thing.. Is the Rainbox Room in NYC the only place where I can feel like I'm in a Billy Wilder movie now? Is it that old fashioned to want my partner to hold me gracefully, or is grinding up against your partner's leg now the standard? A few years back, I would have been okay with some 80s dancing, you know, some Molly Ringwald white girl moves from Breakfast Club.. but now, I don't know. I would have liked some old Otis Redding, maybe a little Sinatra.. I mean, we were there for an hour, and they didn't play any slow songs. I would have dragged Aaron on the floor for some Bryan Adams, just so I could pretend I was in 8th grade again and had someone to dance with. But it didn't happen.

Aaron, being the sweet guy that I know (and most of you have yet to see), decided to live with the excrutiating pain of wearing stuffy shoes with his recently removed toenails to treat us to a grown up dinner. I suggested Sullivan's which I had been to one other time in my life, but was too trashed to remember any of it. We ordered a half bottle of wine (it was an actual little bottle!), some escargots and french onion soup. The escargot even had the little shells like in Pretty Woman, I kept thinking "It happens all the time, Miss" in my head. Vivien was right though, they are slippery suckers, I kept shooting them across the plate! Aaron had the filet and I had lobster. And guess what? We had the grown up night I had been craving, valet parking to boot! The only thing missing was the dancing. It turns out that Sullivans usually has a big band or some jazzy thing at their bar next door, but won't start up again until May.

So if any of you out there are interested in a night of dinner and some actual cheek to cheek (the non-butt kind), let me know and we can all make a night of it in May, maybe for Aaron's birthday.