Welcome to the Finer Things Club! If it helps, there won’t be a pop quiz about Angela’s Ashes.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes my wife Anne and I find excuses to leave the house for fun besides comic-cons, road trips, movies or extra groceries! It isn’t often, but we’re open to the concept. It beats doomscrolling in our comfy chairs. We’d venture out more often if we were invited, but we aren’t into sports or alcohol, which tend to be the only incentives that 98% of Americans offer or respond to in laboratory tests. Sure, we could invite other folks out on our own terms, which Anne has been known to do on selective occasions, but as a lifelong introvert, I’m not one for taking the initiative, not even if you pass me some on a serving tray and insist, “Here, please enjoy some initiative, on the house.” It doesn’t help that our offline friends here in Indianapolis tend to lead busier lives than we do, and our internet friends don’t cross state lines too often and don’t consider Indiana a tempting vacation destination, despite all our sports and alcohol.

Once upon a time four months ago, two of our friends were preparing to move far away from here to another country — one with its own storied forms of sports and alcohol, often combined with disastrous results — and our li’l circle wanted to get together one last time before we never see them again in person and come to appreciate their future social media posts all the more. After extensive text negotiations our circle’s female half informed the male half our occasion would be something called “high tea”. I thought this was just one of their frequent Anglophile in-jokes, like when they used to bring up Harry Potter a lot. But no, “high tea” is a thing that Americans can do, even when it isn’t “tea time” on the grandfather clocks in any of the British Empire’s few remaining time zones.

So we agreed to try a new thing, even though Anne has hated tea ever since she was traumatized by a childhood prank. But we understand compromise is a thing friends do, even though compromises are against the 2025 Terminally Online Code of Conduct.

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