girls just wanna have fun

I was just talking to L about our plans to celebrate (belatedly) her birthday tomorrow and she suggested that, besides fascial manipulation, presents, and possible swimming, she might just want to go to Kowloons in this fit of Route 1 nostalgia she's been going through. (I've already been to Hilltop with her this year; all we have to do is play putt putt under the giant orange dinosaur and the trifecta would be complete.) "Cool!" I said. "I can buy you a virgin pina colada. Or one with alcohol, though I know you prefer without."

"That's okay," she said. "Either way, I can pretend it's my 21st birthday all over again."

"No, no, no," I said. "We were legal at 20, not 21." It's true; you can look it up.

So that led to a discussion of how it didn't really matter, and all the clubs we got into before we actually were legal, it being a whole different world in 1981. "Jacob's Ladder in Revere," I mused fondly. L didn't quite remember going there with me and our friend I (more than once! I think the early onset Alzheimer's is sneaking in) but when I told her about how the three of us sat at the outside bar by the pool and ate all the bartender's fruit garnishes while his back was turned, she had to admit it sounded right. That's how we rolled.

This led to more fond remembrances of our escapades with I. There was the time we went to Jason's (?), the then-famous dance club in the Back Bay, and I, who was driving her father's humungous late-70s era Cadillac (aka the Greek Pimpmobile) and who couldn't drive under the best of circumstances, never mind buzzed on champagne and trying to back a car the size of a battleship out of a postage stamp-sized parking lot, hit about six different cars by the time she made it out to Boylston Street. (I think that was my 18th birthday, but I couldn't swear to it. The early-onset Alzheimer's is catching. Even over the phone, apparently.) Followed by the time our friend I backed that self-same Cadillac onto a fire hydrant across from L's house. This, in the middle of the afternoon, and not drunk.

L said, "Oh, those were the days, when that was the biggest thing we had to worry about, how to lie about the scratches on I's dad's car..."

But you know what? I think in reality we're both actually glad to be the people we are now, not the people we were when we were 19, worries and all. Though I still wouldn't leave any pineapple chunks unattended around us, you understand.

xoxo