Well done you for getting up and getting the someone-in-a-position-to-act to act, too.

I think my reaction this time satisfied me, because my senior year in high school (2 and a half years ago), two guys came dressed as black guys, and everybody, including me, much to my shame now, thought it was funny. I didn’t go to an entirely white school, it was actually pretty racially diverse, and nobody seemed to have a problem with these two guys. But then again, a black girl came in white face, so I think my school altogether was either extraordinarily accepting, or just messed up. You decide.

I just had to get that off my chest and see if anybody else could recommend what I could have done in that Halloween situation, seeing as it was Halloween and people tend to let go of PC-ness at that point.

I arrived when he was already firmly established at the table and tried pointedly ignoring him too, which wasn’t working, and was wondering what the hell else to do because he seemed drunk enough to react any number of ways if we tried plainspeaking.

Fortunately he solved the problem for me by putting his arm round my friend and pulling her toward him, at which point she and I simultaneously went “NO!” and she pushed him away and he wouldn’t stop touching her and trying to wrap his arm round her. I went straight the fuck to the bar and said to the lovely bar woman “There’s a guy harassing my friend, he’s all over her, he won’t stop touching her” and she was like “Where?” so I pointed to where she was having to FIGHT HIM OFF and the woman was like “Yeah, I’m throwing him out”, which she then totally did. It was great. GTFO, random fucking weird drunk guy. It was no fun meeting you.

This pub also has “Climb Every Mountain” from the Sound of Music in their karaoke selection. This pub is awesome.

One of the things the main character mentions is how she gained so much weight and became so fat, and now she weighed 140. My reaction at the time was something along the lines of “WTF? I’m 140!” [I think I was actually more like 160, but my scale routinely read 10 lbs lower than a doctor's scale would, plus I was in denial about my actual weight.] I did not think of myself as fat, though I did think of myself as on the heavy end of not-fat. The book did not change that, but it did make me wonder if the book would encourage eating disorders, and it also made me wonder if the main character was really short.

@Zenoodle – My grandfather was a merchant marine and had a bunch of tattoos, also. My parents never took issue with me knowing about them (they were far more scared of allowing me in the car when he was driving…) and we have family stories about how he used to embarrass my aunt in front of dates by making the sailor on his upper arm “dance.”