Saturday night, The Girlfriend and I attended a performance by the Peking Acrobats and were duly amazed by jaw-dropping exhibitions of human flexibility, strength, balance, and sheer showmanship. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend you see this show. You will be entertained, to paraphrase our old friend Maximus. And if you have children, it’s even family-friendly. Seriously. The kids in the audience were utterly spellbound.

However, as fascinating as it was to see a 70-pound Asian woman of indeterminate age twist herself around so that her butt was literally sitting on top of her own head (and then have six of her friends get on top of her and do exactly the same thing!), that was only a prelude to the real show we experienced on the way home…

[Warning: harsh language and some ickiness ahead, so click away now if you’re squeamish. I’m not kidding!]

The Acrobats performed at Kingsbury Hall on the U of U campus, so Anne and I had decided it would be more convenient to ride TRAX (Salt Lake’s light-rail system) than driving ourselves into town and finding some place to park the car. Good idea, except that by the time the performance was over and we were finally on a train bound for home, it was a little after 10 PM, and anyone who’s ever ridden public transit that late at night knows that’s about when the crazies start spilling out of whatever daycare center keeps them contained while the sun is still up.

The train was crowded with suburban patrons of the arts like Anne and myself, people who’d been to see either the Acrobats or the Blue Man Group, which also performed in SLC that night. Anne and I were sitting up front, in the seats reserved for handicapped passengers. (Before you start lobbing tomatoes, there were no handicapped passengers — yet — and those had been the only seats available.) All perfectly normal.

But then, only one stop after we’d boarded, an obviously drunk woman with a British accent stumbled up the forward stairs and flopped into the handicapped seat opposite Anne and me, asking in a very loud voice if I thought “having her knees kicked out” (whatever that means) qualified her as handicapped. I told her sure, why not?, hoping that would be the end of it. She swayed a little, then proceeded to tell us all about how she’d been hitchhiking and gotten pulled over by the cops — a neat trick, since one normally has to be in a car to be “pulled over” — and asked if she’d been abused. She never told us how she answered, because she spotted Anne’s souvenir teddy bear and wanted to know what it was for. We told her we’d just seen the Peking Acrobats, and she enthusiastically announced that she’d seen the Peking Acrobats three — no, four — no, six! — times and that they’d absolutely “blown her mind.” She also said we looked like a sweet couple and, oh by the way, are we in love or just dating? In the end, she wasn’t a bad traveling companion at all, aside from being too loud in that way drunks so often are.

“Wait!,” you’re probably thinking, “that’s not so very interesting. A pleasant drunk? So what?” Be patient, kids, be patient…

The Drunken Brit rode with us for a couple of stops, then got up to leave the train, and here’s where things got really weird. When the doors opened, she was pushed aside by a brusque woman who was muttering “Get the fuck out of my way,” all slurred together so it sounded like “getthefuckoutofmyway,” over and over again. (The British drunk responded to the newcomer’s rudeness by stepping to one side and making a kind of “be my guest” gesture with her hands; she was friendly and amusing to the last.) This new arrival looked to be in her 50s, overweight and generally unkempt-looking, dressed in the shabby manner of someone who’s not quite down and out enough to be homeless, but isn’t too far from the edge. From her unsteady behavior and the “getthefuckoutofmyway” mantra, I assumed she also was drunk, or maybe high, or possibly mentally disturbed. She was accompanied by a man who looked to be in the same state, as well as by a godawful stench that instantly rolled through the whole front of the train car like a surge of water through a submarine whose pressure hull has just ruptured. And she was headed right for the seat that the Drunken Brit had just vacated, the one opposite Anne and me.

The Girlfriend and I turned to each other simultaneously and, in one of those perfectly choreographed right-out-of-the-movies moments, asked each other the same question: “Do you want to move?”

We got up without answering our mutual question and made our way aft, to the next stairwell back (the train was standing-room only at this point). Safely away from the muttering, stinky woman, Anne asked me in a quiet voice if I’d noticed the woman’s pants. I told her I’d hadn’t. (I try to maintain the classic New York-style don’t-look-at-anybody indifference when I’m on the train — especially when it comes to shabby, muttering people.) Anne said the woman’s ass was bare, that she was holding her pants down at about the mid-thigh level. Her bare ass was sitting on the fabric-covered seat of a public train, where other people would put their own clothed bottoms later on. Possibly bottoms that were covered in white. And if that wasn’t distasteful enough, Anne had gotten a glimpse of the source of the smell as we moved away from the woman: she had apparently defecated in her pants.

Morbid curiosity compelled me to sneak a peek. I couldn’t see much. Ms. Crappy Pants was pretty well concealed from my view. I did see that many of the passengers in front of us had turned away in disgust and were holding scarves and stocking hats over their noses, except for a young lady in her early 20s who was busily text-messaging on her phone. She was in a backwards-facing seat and apparently hadn’t bothered to look around, because she didn’t seem to know where the odor was coming from. Her thumbs still twitching on the keypad of her phone, she suddenly said to herself — I assume it was to herself, because there wasn’t anyone else sitting with her — “Ohmygod, what is that smell? That’s off-en-sive!” (She repeated “that’s off-en-sive” probably half a dozen times, never looking around or breaking from her texting pace once.) After a few moments, she put her phone down long enough to rummage in her purse for a bottle of cheap, Walgreen’s perfume, which she sprayed into the air around her head a dozen or so times. (I remarked to Anne, “Great, now we have violet-scented shit. And that’s so much better…”)

Luckily, Ms. Crappy Pants was only on the train for one or two stops, thank god. When she got up to leave, her companion shouted after her that she was getting off at the wrong spot. She yelled something unintelligible back at him and got off anyway. I caught a glimpse of her big, cellulite-ridden, pasty-white ass as she left the train and then she was gone, leaving behind a nasty outhouse stink that took a couple more stops to fully vent off.

But wait! The ride wasn’t over yet! We still had a dessert to come after the appetizer (the Drunken Brit) and the main course (Ms. Crappy Pants).

At the stop where Ms. Crappy Pants left the train, another interesting creature came aboard: a thin young man wearing zebra-stripe pants, a long denim coat with fur trim around the collar and down the front, and a tall white furry hat, which looked like something a Russian pimp might wear. He didn’t do anything weird or offensive — he just flopped into the seat next to Off-en-sive Girl and sat quietly for his ride south — but he was the final straw for Anne. With a pale face and a trembling voice, she announced to me that the next time we go see a performance at the U or downtown, she’d like to drive please, and she’d even pay the parking charge.

I just laughed and reminded her of how much entertainment we’d had this evening: not only had we seen a 90-minute performance by incredibly flexible Asian girls, we’d also been treated to a drunken Brit, a woman who’d crapped herself, and a gay Cossack. What more could she want?