Every year in March, thousands of lesbians gather in Palm Springs to attend the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament. Most don't go to watch golf. Rather, women flock to the desert for the weekend to swill cocktails, hang out at swimming pools crowded with half-naked sistahs, and have anonymous sex with women that their friends back home would never approve of.
I've been invited to the event several times, but I've never been able to attend until this year. I always imagined that when I did finally make the trip I'd be accompanied by my funnest set of friends–the ones who give bad behavior a good name.
But, instead, I found myself in the midst of the hottest lesbian social occasion of the year with two people who give good behavior a bad name. My parents.
My parents are spending the winter in Palm Springs. They demanded that my brother and I visit them, so I convinced my brother to meet me there on the Dinah Shore weekend.
From the moment I arrived, my mother put me on notice that she was not planning on letting me out of her raptor-like sight all weekend. After my parents collected me at the airport, we drove down the main drag of town. Hundreds of women with promising haircuts were strolling down the sidewalks.
'Wow, look at all the lesbians,' my dad said with a low whistle.
I immediately lurched for the door handle, but my mother flicked the child-safety lock before I could open the door and throw myself out of the car and into the lesbian throng.
'Don't even think about it,' she said, as I struggled to unlock the door. 'You're coming back to our house and we're playing a board game.'
'Oh, Christ, can we skip the game and just get drunk?' I said, looking sadly out the window as two impossibly beautiful women shoved their tongues down each other's throats. They were wearing little more than the silk scarves they had tied around their graceful necks.
'That's fine,' said my mother, who happily has generous views on alcohol. 'But you're going to spend the weekend drinking with your brother, father and me and NOT with a bunch of strangers.'
At that moment, I thought there was nothing more pathetic than cruising Palm Canyon Boulevard with my parents, ogling women from the backseat of their Town Car. But as the weekend continued its downward spiral, plenty of new humiliations awaited me.
When we got to their house, my brother was waiting by the pool with a look reminiscent of an insect that was slowly dying after having its wings pinned to an entomologist's pegboard.
'They're driving me crazy,' he said in a hurried whisper. 'We've got to breakout of here tonight.'
'There's a big lesbian party at the Marriot,' I said.
'I'll drop you off on my way to meet friends in L.A.,' he said.
'Did I hear someone say 'party?'' my mother asked, sweeping up to us in her Lily Pulitzer cabana wear.
'You're not invited,' I said. 'It's an all-women party.'
'Well, I'm a woman,' my mother said, refusing to take the hint. 'What time does it start? We'll need to leave early so we can pick up a hostess gift.'
In the next thrilling episode: My mother and I attend a big lesbian party and she is more popular than I am. Sigh.