Close Encounter

This is post 9 of Section IV. To begin at the beginning, go here. Section II begins here. Section III begins here. Section IV begins here.

Sheba fluttered nervously. Frank burst out laughing and declared Glenn was priceless. But before he could say more, Willie Eisenberg, the woman who had danced so provocatively on the bar at the bachelor party, strode in, towing her date for the occasion, a wiry looking African American woman who made up for very short hair with very long earrings. “Jack,” Willie said, biting off each word with her faint German accent. “Something has got to be done about that Troglodyte out there.”
“Hi everybody. I’m Karen,” Willie’s date put in, shaking hands firmly all round. “We made the mistake of trying to have a discussion with him.”
“Wow—a close encounter,” Robert said in an awed voice. “A rational exchange with an alien life form. What was it like?”
Karen snorted. “You’re giving the alien too much credit.”
“I never wanted to strike somebody so much in all my life,” Willie said grimly. She was shifting her weight from one foot to the other like a boxer. “He desecrated my grandparents’ memory.”
“We tried to draw an analogy between the way the religious right stigmatizes people who disagree with them and the tactics of the Third Reich,” Karen explained.
“He went berserk,” Willie said, taking over. “Started yelling about how the religious right was going to be the victims of the next Holocaust, and how there ought to be a Holocaust Museum for all the unborn children we butcher each year.”
“Wil was practically frothing at the mouth,” Karen said. “I had to drag her away—and only out of consideration for you guys. Can we beat him up after the ceremony? Please?”

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