$72 Worth of Wierd
Ah, Thanksgiving - surrounded by friends and family in the bosom of your home and hearth. Unless you hail from Cheery Hell.
After sitting in Logan from 2 pm til 7.30 pm on a flight delay, the Jersey experience began. I'm not going to get all into it but Thanksgiving night ended up with my mom's side of the family fighting like Springer while my cousin had a medical-drama-breakdown (I can't walk - I'm hospital sick - I'm crying - but I'm okay to drive - I'm chain smoking in between coughing like a wino with emphezema)- but, really, I can drive - stop telling me I'm over reacting, bitch! I'm sick! [chair is cracked over a head, blond hair flies, shirts are ripped off]. As you may guess, this resulted in me offering to drive them the 1.5 hours home with Dad following behind. They protested but, in my brilliance, I said "Oh no, that's okay - Dad and I can hit the casinos!" (Yep - they live in the glow of the A.C. strip). So, I ended up at 3 am with my brother Dan and my Dad dropping $200 each at the Trop. Oy. And they put the dog in the kennel for this.
Friday. 10 Year reunion. $72 and I got a few pieces of computer printout stapled together with about 2 dozen names and emails "Barry Schwartz is a CPA living in New York. His email is barry.schwartz@boringcpafirm.com"; "Heather Henry is still a horsey looking snob (despite her nose job) who won't acknowledge that she's known you since you were 9. Her email address is heather@imlookingrightthroughyou.com". Since the $72 was supposed to buy the research into tracking everyone down, I expected an actual INVITE to the bloody thing. But no. And when I signed in to pay at the door, I got "Whitman? Yeah - that's a hard one to track down." Especially when there is exactly ONE listing for Whitman in the Cherry Hill phone book, and the address happens to EXACTLY MATCH the one printed under my face in the freaking YEARBOOK. Idiots. $72 and I got a buffet dinner that no one ate because there were only about 3 tables for 100 people and the chairs were all laden with coats and purses and crap. So Janice had a roll and I had the leftover half of her piece of cake. $72 to help pay for a cheesy DJ trying desperately to lure people to the 5' x 5' dance floor with the sweet sounds of "Baby Got Back" and "Hot in Here". No Bon Jovi? What's wrong with these people? And, the worst of the worst: $72 admission for a cash bar. The gall!
Now, what $72 did NOT buy me the following conversation. This had to occur at the "after party" at this cheesy ass bar in Marlton (Sheila - you must apply a heavy discount factor to this new guy of yours for the sheer fact that he chooses to live there) - so cheesy that it was filled with loud techno, about 100 Cherry Hill East Class of 1994 alums, and two pairs of 50 somethings making out disgustingly at the bar. There was a contingent of smart folks who saved their $72 and applied it to a counter-reunion at this bar apparently and who were still hanging around. One of this contingent is a person known as the Meryl-Go-Round who stopped speaking to me in 1995 following some loose gossip about her freshman year pregnancy scare and, in my opinon, an extremely well executed Maxi-padding of our friend Tay's car while they were at the movies on a double date. But I digress. The conversation in question went loosely like this:
MGR: "So, did you hear Larry's married?" (note: Larry was my high school sweetheart and collegiate friend with benefits whom I ultimately cut off in 1999 following some misunderstandings on his part about how a FWB situation is supposed to work)
me: "Huh - I figured - he's been looking to settle down for a while." (see above)
MGR: "Do you know who he married?"
me: "No..."
MGR: "Barb! Barbara Carroll!"
me: "Um...isn't she like a hard-core lesbian?"
Well, there you go. Barb was a good friend of mine in high school - in fact, just that very afternoon I had a chuckle out of the Militant Feminist Barbie Doll she had made me for my 16th birthday as I was rooting through the depths of my closet. Barb was always a little fast and loose, and also had a taste for my sloppy seconds, dating my first boyfriend Fred, the psycho cat kicker (note: I did not know about the cat kicking before dating him; she did) and then, after Larry and I broke up before college, she was dating him by the New Year (which I told her in advance was NOT okay with me. she did it anyway. i took the high road and did not then bitch). Of course, by March she had come out to me as a bi-sexual, saying that Larry was trying to cope with it by researching it at the library. By June, Larry called me for the first time in a year, crying because Barb had dumped him for her freshman year roommate. Well, go figure.
For the next three years, Larry and I saw each other off and on and Barb ate out any willing female in Central Jersey, sending me detailed emails with suggestive uses and the pros and cons of Saran Wrap.
Who's to say what's transpired since, but I haven't heard from either of them since, say, 1998-9 or so. I guess everyone gets their happily ever after.
(note: Sheila, as you may guess this is coming: guess which town Larry grew up in? Yup. Guess where the happy couple live now? Yup. Tread carefully...)
