Flashback

Look what turned up on facebook this week. This picture was taken probably in June of 1990, in Destin, Florida, where I went with Sam and Melissa for a post-graduation celebration. I am the one on the left, in case you could not figure that out.

I don't know if it is stranger that I almost do not recognize myself, or that I remember the details of that nite like it was yesterday. I knew that photo the second I got tagged, and I do not know if I have ever even seen it. I can tell you exactly what Melissa's outfit was and even the shorts Sam was wearing--I have no idea about mine. Funny how that works.

And before we go any further, NO, we are not sporting mullets. That was the era of pulling your hair up in a barrette and leaving it long in the back. A pseudo-mullet, if you will. What the hell were we thinking?

So anyway, let me tell you about that nite. We had probably been in town only a day or two (look how pale I am, so it had to be early)--we drove down in Samantha's fancy red Daytona, thinking we were the shit, singing and giggling and all around having regular high school girl fun. That restaurant was The Back Porch, and Sam and I were very familiar with it, as we went to Destin every year with her Dad and family, and always ate there a lot. It was a swell restaurant.

It must be popular with a lot of people from this town, as we kept accidently bumping into people from here. That is not the best thing to happen when you are cheering it up with real daiquiris when you are 18, and anyone from here would have known that. Eh, we did not care so much. We thought we were invincible.

We left that nite and took the wrong mastercard receipt and got chased out of the restaurant by the manager to get it back. We freaked, thinking that they were going to catch us smuggling out our drinks--we were not about to leave any behind, who knew when we could score more? It rained hard on the way back to our condo, and there was an accident so we had to take a detour. We had car trouble too, so Sam had to take the car in the next morning. That is when we learned that we had drunkenly forgotten fish leftovers in the car. That was an unpleasant discovery, probably for the car dealership as well.

So many things I remember about that week--some crazy, some horrible, and some of the best memories of my life. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to put a frog in bed with Sam, and then give her a bottle of Canadian Mist that I had found (probably filched from another party, truth be known) to make up for it. Poor girl was just trying to sleep! By the end of the week, I had gotten so sick, I think they were afraid I was going to die on the way home. I learned that puking up Gatorade is not a good thing, so I never drank it again. When I got home, I had to go to the hospital to learn I had a jillion things wrong with me, most notable mono.

We laughed so much that week--the kind of side splitting laughs that leave you sore the next day. We always laughed like that. We fought too, I remember storming out of the house tromping down the road in the middle of the nite in a long Whitesnake t-shirt and underwear, over some fight with Melissa, and Sam yelling at everyone that it was not acceptable to be stalking down the side of the dang highway in my underwear at 3 am. Good point she had there. Even that makes me laugh now.

Isn't it strange how you think things will never change, and then they do. I have not seen either of these girls since our 10 year reunion, which was 9 years ago. That is a shame.