BlogHer 07 Part Last: The Saga of the Stinky Cheese

BlogHer fell on Kimberly‘s birthday weekend and her husband had gone all out, scoring us a hotel room with a lakefront view, an enormous arrangement of flowers, free room service and minibar (and you know I was all over that), and a gourmet gift basket awaiting our arrival. There was only one problem.

“It’s so great finally meeting you!” I squealed as I entered the room and saw her for the first time. Then I stopped short and gasped. “What’s that stench?!”

The room smelled like ass. No, worse. It smelled like a dead man’s ass. A dead man’s ass that hadn’t been washed. Ever.

“It’s cheese,” Kim said with disgust. “They put cheese in the gift basket and something’s wrong with it.” Kim had put the cheese (a wheel of Camembert, in case you were wondering) in the refrigerator, but it did no good. The room still reeked. Beside me, Busy Mom giggled.

“Good luck with that,” she said, heading quickly out the door while trying not to inhale.

“Oh geez, we can’t live like this,” I said after about 15 minutes of chatting. “We’ve got to do something with that cheese.” Quickly, I dialed Busy Mom’s number.

“Uh, can I come down to your room for a minute?” I asked. “Kim’s in the shower and I have to use the bathroom.”

“Sure, come on down,” Busy Mom said. I put the cheese in the waistband of my jeans and headed over.

Once inside the loo, I put the Camembert beneath the spare roll of toilet paper and left as soon as possible.

By the time Kim, Busy Mom and I left for dinner a few hours later, our room’s scent was almost back to normal. Busy Mom wasn’t so lucky.

“My room’s starting to smell like yours,” she said as we walked to the restaurant.

“Really?” I said. “Maybe something died in the vent.”

“Maybe,” she shrugged.

Dinner segued into two different cocktail parties and the cheese (and everything else) was forgotten. At midnight that night, I went back to my room and decided to check in on Busy Mom down the hall. I knocked on the door and when she opened it, the stench nearly knocked me down.

“Busy Mom,” I sputtered. “Your room reeks!”

“Oh, you get used to it after a while,” she said good-naturedly. I felt bad.

“Did you think of looking in your bathroom for the source?” I asked. She looked confused. “In your bathroom under the toilet paper?” A light bulb appeared over her head and she ran to the bathroom and then emerged, holding the cheese.

“Now you’ve got to pass it on!” I said, making a hasty exit. Unfortunately, my exit was so hasty, I forgot my bag. I went back, retrieved it, and went to bed.

At about 2am, I woke up briefly and thought I smelled it. The cheese. At 6am, Bruiser woke me up again and I fed him. The stench was stronger. And that’s when it hit me.

“Aaaarrrgh!” I said, looking down at my bag beside the bed. Sure enough, when I checked inside, the cheese was there. Good one, Busy Mom.

I couldn’t let this dastardly deed slide. There was no hope of getting into Busy Mom’s room undetected, so I made the supreme sacrifice and brought the cheese with me to the BlogHer conference. By this time, it had been out of the the fridge for nearly 24 hours and smelled even worse than a dead man’s ass. It smelled more like 400 fat men had eaten sauerbraten and then farted simultaneously. I put it in the bottom of Bruiser’s stroller and hoped it would pass for a poopy diaper. When we arrived at Navy Pier, Kimberly stowed the stinky cheese in a large planter in the lobby.

It wasn’t until after lunch that we found an opportunity to return the cheese to its rightful owner. Busy Mom was sitting beside Kimberly and me for the speaker training session and we slipped it into her bag under the computer table. We left as soon as the session ended and headed back to the hotel, so that the cheese couldn’t be passed back to us.

What we hadn’t anticipated was that the stinky cheese’s noxious fumes would end up being one of the session highlights. For the rest of the weekend, we periodically heard stories about the “woman who kept farting” during the speaker training session. And when I was telling someone about the stinky cheese’s travels the next morning, she said she’d gotten a text message the day before that someone in one of the sessions had bad gas. Meanwhile, a few hours after the drop had been made into Busy Mom’s computer bag, I got a text message on my own phone.

Item has been relocated, it read. That is all.

I didn’t see the stinky cheese for the rest of the day, but I guessed by the stories I was hearing that it was making the rounds. Jenny Lauck complained that a dead bird was in the a/c vent beside her table in the vendor room. Another woman told me the elevator reeked of dead fish. And finally beside me the next afternoon in the lobby, Izzy wrinkled her nose and said she was sure she smelled cabbage.

“Yep,” she said, “I’d know that smell anywhere.” Inexplicably, she began rooting through her bag, almost as if she’d found rotting cabbage there before. Instead, she pulled out a wheel of Camembert. She sniffed it curiously and then…

“AIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!” she shrieked, throwing it on the floor. The group of women that had surrounded her scattered. For several long moments, the cheese stood alone.

Finally, Jenn Satterwhite was brave enough to pick up the cheese and put it in a spare computer bag, while Izzy stood well back from the scene.

At this point, 48 hours from refrigeration, the cheese smelled like a vat of hospital patients’ bile that had been left out in the sun for a long, long time. It smelled so bad, in fact, that when I held open the bag for Yvonne to smell, she ran to a nearby trashcan, dry heaving.

I refused to have anything more to do with the cheese after that, so it’s hard to say exactly where it finished its BlogHer experience. Did it end up under the table where Amy Sedaris signed copies of her book? Was it hidden somewhere in the shuttle bus used to transport BlogHer attendees between Navy Pier and their hotels? Or was it stashed in Lisa Stone’s purse when she wasn’t looking?

Who nose?