Yesterday, I was part of a group of colleagues entertaining an out-of-town colleague’s client who was visiting New York.  The client is vegan, so we tried a highly rated vegan restaurant in Gramercy Park.  Not a piece of bread for the table.  There is nothing non-vegan about bread. The food was tasteless.  There is nothing non-vegan about flavor.  There was not enough food in a serving.  There is nothing non-vegan about healthy-sized servings.  Somehow even the protein sourced from non-animals didn’t fill me up.  There is nothing non-vegan about a few extra pounds around the midsection. Maybe I ordered wrong because all I seemed to eat was grass and shrubbery.

Later in the day we took the client to a basketball game.  There is nothing non-vegan about popcorn, french fries, onion rings, beer, pretzels and peanuts.  Being vegan CAN BE awesome.  Imagine being able to say the following: “Sweetie, I had to eat the fries and rings and roasted peanuts, because there was nothing else.  What could I do?”

But everyone grabbed all the food I had and left me alone, waiting for some miscellaneous things, like wine and mixed drinks that were ordered. And, I was starving.

I looked to my left.  No one I know.  I looked to my right.  No one I know.  I turned around.  Uh oh, a colleague on his cell phone. But, wait, I remembered that he doesn’t have such good far-vision.  So, the coast was clear.  I put on my sunglasses anyway.

I proceeded to order a decidedly, and possibly offensively, un-vegan hot dog and scarfed it down so no one would see. Immediately, I felt terrible about what I had done.  Here I was stuffing sausage derived from mystery meat of inhumanely killed animals and we were entertaining someone who has a conscience.

Then I was sure Karma would boomerang and I would be the Lucille Ball character in a “Here’s Lucy” episode where she was at a gallery opening and she started breaking out in hives.  Lucy excused herself.  Then the spotlights turn on, a curtain is pulled back and there is Lucy behind the prized sculpture, scratching her hives and looking like a deer caught in headlights.

But I wasn’t caught.  Except when I got home, I noticed a mustard stain on my jacket . . . .

Karma IS a boomerang.