The 40 Year Old Sister

I don’t feel old because my sister is 40, I feel young because I’m not. If I can approach turning that age with even half the carefree attitude and zest for life that Mrs Ryan did then I will be doing well. When it came time to celebrate my first sibling to hit a 4th decade the birthday girl wore a policewoman’s uniform. Age will not weary her, nor shall the law – Office Naughty was there to party.

Several markers will often be found at a Painefull family party:

A theme ripe for inappropriate outfits (or bizarre nonsensical adaptation)…

Thus Mrs Ryan chose to brand the event Vicars, Tarts & Mourners, host the gathering at a former church (now bar) and opted to attend dressed as a rather slutty officer of the law (Officer Naughty). That’s also why Mother Painefull looked like a gangland widow and there was a pregnant nun wandering through the general vicinity.

Compared to the cross-dressing themed Christmas we once held, it all had a certain amount of logic to it.

Someone will strip and/or perform a musical song & dance number…

This time around we got both – there was Mrs Ryan slowly removing items of clothing to the familiar strain of You Can Leave Your Hat On, and later came Mrs Woog hijacking the band to perform her very own cover of Blister In The Sun.

Speeches, speeches, speeches…

While dinner parties usually require everyone to give a speech, this one simply called upon a couple of well-honed, highly embarrassing ones. It’s how we’ve all developed such wonderfully thick skins over the years. Mrs Woog used hers to reveal that when she asked her son Barry what words he would use to describe his aunt Mrs Ryan, he replied “Old and mean”.

Father Painefull’s hair gets drunk…

Along with the rest of him. You can tell Father Painefull is about to begin speaking in random non sequiturs when his hair starts sticking up.

Mr Woog will call it a night hours earlier than anyone else…

You don’t get to be that baby-faced without some extra beauty sleep.

Someone will purge either physically or emotionally…

And so at the end of the evening back at Casa de Family Painefull, another, unnamed sister found herself vomiting into the kitchen sink while in the process of calling a cab.

To the above list I may eventually have to include The Painefull family continues their love affair with Jim. As I have mentioned before, Jim is my Fake Husband, though he may have soured things a bit on the dance floor when he dropped Mrs Woog. Jim’s personal highlight probably came when a completely random stranger on the dance floor offered to leave her husband for him.

I think having such an elderly family has its definite advantages – old people really seem to know how to party. Plus I can mock them in the smug certainty that no matter how many years I have aged, they’ve aged more.


Painefull Out