Table for Two, Party of Twenty-Four
I ironed my shirt in a cheap hotel light
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Table for Two, Party of Twenty-Four
Two people agree to meet at a restaurant in Jilin province. He irons a shirt and books a table for two. She arrives with twenty-three relatives, and the relatives order the expensive liquor and the cigarettes by the carton. The bill comes to just under 20,000 yuan. He says he'll be right back.
The song is sung from the man's side of the table, in the flat, bored voice of someone telling a story to a friend who has already heard it twice. Fuzzy guitars stay out of the way through the verses and open up on the chorus, where the only thing worth shouting is a headcount.
Twenty-three relatives, one blind date Twenty-three cousins and one good bottle
Headphones, on the walk to a first date, or on the way home from one. It is not really a song about being unlucky in love — the man in it never gets far enough to be unlucky. It is about the arithmetic of other people's expectations, and the small cheap pleasure of paying for exactly two dinners.
Adapted from a case widely reported from Jilin province. Local reports give only the surnames Liu and Zhang: after he walked out, her family sued, and the court ruled he owed only the cost of his own and his date's meal, about 1,400 yuan. Sources: NextShark, via Yahoo News and the r/offbeat discussion. Names are reduced to surnames and the details have not been verified beyond these reports.
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