Our driver, Mona, took us to a party some distance away. Mona was a slender black woman who undermined her prettiness by cramming her round self into the square hole of Marin fashion. Her dark reddish hair was straightened so it pointed stiffly down at her shoulders, and her eyebrows were plucked into arched pencil lines.

The moon was out, and it was a lovely night, with pale clouds drifting over the hills. The party was at a reastaurant beside a lake, mirror still and ringed with big white houses. We had to give our tickets at the door where someone had stationed a large manniken like the ones we saw that the Jewish Film Festival Shabbat. This one was meant to look, I guess, like the quintessential Mill Valley Film Festival patron, a white, slender, chicly dressed woman with long blond hair and collagened lips that stuck out of her gauze face.

There were crowds of artsy but well-dressed people, a small wind band playing film-related tunes like Alfred Hitchcock’s theme (I believe it’s called “Funeral of the Marionnette”) and Laurel and Hardy’s “Dance of the Cuckoos.” A long buffet stretched out in a back room overlooking the water, offering chicken, tomato salad, lamb, and other dishes. I loaded a small plate and met Michael at the bar where he’d found seats for Mona and me and handed us each a glass of white wine before setting off to load his own plate. The food was delicious, the conversation with Mona awkward since we had little in common. I was relieved when her friend, a pretty woman with short blond hair, showed up. They squealed and kissed and fell into deep conversation after explaining to me they had met just two days before and the manicurist while Mona was waiting for her nails to dry. I sat happily silent, enjoying my wine and the view of the lake past the rows of bottles, getting pleasantly drunk while Mona and her friend talked and Michael schmoozed.

After a while I got bored, or perhaps a bit more sober. I saw nobody I wanted to talk to in the dimly lit crush of people, so I went in search of Michael, who’d said he was off to find dessert. Once I located him at the pastry table, I munched on a lemon meringue tart and a fudge square, neither of which I really wanted, and talked politics with a girl named Becky who worked for the festival. It ended only after the restaurant management dimmed the lights, called out that they were closing and finally, in evident desperation, came over and flatly told those of us who remained that it was time to get out.