Horrific Childhood Birthday Parties

*Due to my failing 30 year old memory, I may not have remembered events or people involved correctly unless I had the help of photos. If you read this and you can actually remember who was there, what grade it was, or you weren't there, please tell me. I'll change it!

My parents are the coolest. Every year I could choose pretty much anything I wanted to do for my birthday and they would make it happen. Having an early April birthday, the fortune of my big day falling during Spring Break was a special treat, half the time. Being a girl, these parties were sleepovers 100% of the time.

(Sidenote: Parents of girls who have sleepovers should receive medals.)

Throughout my childhood and teen years, there are four particular parties that stand out in my mind.

Psycho

Earlier in the school year, my best friend Jasmine's mom had introduced us to the black and white Hitchcock classic, Psycho. Neither of us were especially fond of scary movies (and still aren't), but the fact that the blood is black, no violence is shown, and it's from 1960 tones it down several notches. (That's not to say I didn't have an issue with showering for weeks... Or that the image of Norman Bates in the last scene, staring sociopathically into the camera while he thinks, "I wouldn't hurt a fly", isn't burned into my brain for life.)

Frightening, no?

I decided that watching the same movie at my 11th birthday slumber party (1993) would be just perfect. After strategically arranging our sleeping bags in the TV room -- birthday girl in the middle, of course -- and popcorn being made, Jasmine, Anita, Tawnya, Sarah, Lauren, Joni, and I all settled in for a good spook.

Anyone who has seen Psycho knows that very early in the movie, there is a driving scene in which it begins to rain. Very early. Like, probably in the first 15 minutes.

As the six of us stared at the screen, enraptured by the black and white images, terrible background effects, and already terrifying soundtrack, another sound caught our attention. Future discussions about this party would reveal that there were several theories as to what we were hearing. I thought the movie had just gotten louder, and we were somehow hearing the rain pouring down in the Eaton Family's nonexistent Surround Sound. One girl thought a loud truck was driving by, and another thought a human being was actually trying to pound the windows in so he could murder us all.

It started as a faint drumming sound. As it grew louder and more intense, we all realized it wasn't part of the movie and that now was probably a good time to panic. It had become a very distinct pounding on the windows right behind the TV, and was only getting louder. Horrified, some of us were paralyzed with fear, unable to move from the "safety" of our blankets. Sarah bolted out of the room (a very effective fight or flight response, good for her) and ended up locking herself in the guest bathroom, while Joni actually had the balls to stomp over to the locked front door, OPEN IT, and yell, "Who's out there!?" (I don't recommend this. Norman Bates himself could have been waiting on the front stoop, ready to snatch Joni and replace his dead mother with her.)

You know who was there? My dad. With a hose.

For the rest of the night, not a one of us would have the guts to go to the bathroom without a partner.

Tea Party

My mom is classy. As far back as I can remember she has always been an excellent cook and baker, as well as a talented quilter and seamstress. She can craft just about anything, appreciates the theater, and enjoys hosting fancy tea parties and luncheons for her friends. She's basically Martha Stewart without the convictions or prison time.

I am realizing every day how much like my mom I have become, and while I thoroughly enjoy some of these things now (I haven't jumped on the sewing train quite yet, but I'm sure I'll get there), as a kid I wasn't all that interested.

It was my mom's idea to have a tea party and see a play for my 12th birthday party. I invited three friends, Jasmine, Lauren, and Shauna. (If you've read my story about Shauna, you may wonder why she was invited to this party... well, I wonder the same thing. Middle school girls are mysterious creatures.)

My mom made us tea, along with other tea party necessities like cucumber sandwiches and fancy cookies.

We then made the drive down to Santa Maria to watch the PCPA Theater put on an entertaining stage production.

Two reasons this birthday party is so memorable to me:

1.  I had been nervous about inviting my middle school friends to a tea party, and wasn't so sure I'd enjoy it myself. All of us were served delicious food and entertained, so there was nothing to complain about. We were quite sophisticated.

2. It was Easter time. It was 1994. So we wore these dresses:

Frightening, no?

Murder Mystery

My group of friends and I went through a "boxed murder mystery" party phase that lasted years. I can't remember who started it, but once we knew about the games, we couldn't stay away from them. Ever intrigued by a quality who-dunnit, and being females who took any opportunity to dress up like someone else, these games were the perfect solution to the 'tween years' what-should-I-do-for-my-party? problem.

One of the funniest parts about these game-oriented parties was that it required up to ten or twelve people to portray the characters involved. At least for me, this meant inviting way more people than I normally would to a birthday party. While I was friendly with most girls from my class throughout childhood, I always had (and still have) a very small group of close friends. I preferred a small group of true, trusted pals than a huge group of people who didn't know each other all that well. (This has served me well considering I'm still very close to my best friends from elementary school!)

I am almost positive that the title of the game we played for my 13th birthday (1995) was The Grapes of Frath. It had to do with a murder among the grapevines of some winery. (I believe this was an adult version of the murder mystery phenomenon that my parents had lying around. At the time there were Jr. versions that probably didn't involve stories centered on alcohol, but how fun would that be?) Maybe. We hardly had the attention span to play the game when we were living it (many of the parties ended with us confused and bored, or never actually finding out who the murderer was), so I can't really remember the storyline 17 years later...

(Sidenote: Lauren threw one of these parties last year for her 30th birthday called Murder in Margaritaville, for old time's sake. It's amazing what an adult attention span can do for these games.)

The most memorable character in my mind was the opera singer, who my friend Anita portrayed. We'd borrowed a viking hat from our Slavic math teacher, Mr. Indvik, so she would be as authentic looking as possible.

At the last minute, one of my girlfriends had to back out of attending my party, which left a character open. Having each player/character present was crucial for these games, or else evidence and clues might be left out when trying to solve the murder.

Remember how awesome my parents are? My dad disappeared for awhile early in the evening, only to emerge and surprise us all as the understudy for my missing friend:

Frightening, no?

Surprise Gorilla

My sixteenth birthday (1998) happened to fall during the same week as Templeton High School's Sadie Hawkins dance. The tradition was for the girls to ask the boys, and then dress like twins. This was the year I had met Jordan on the winter camp bus (see A Short List of the Boys I Have Loved), and we were still talking, so I invited him. Our breathtakingly creative twin outfits? Jeans, white t-shirts, and UCSB sweatshirts (thanks, Uncle John!). 

My family planned to take me out to dinner before meeting a group of dance-goers at our house. We went to Lolo's, a popular Mexican food place. On the way home, I can remember getting annoyed at either my brother, or one/both of my parents. I probably thought we were going to be late and that people were already waiting for us at the house. 

I pulled our light blue Mercury Villager into the driveway as speedily as I could without making my mom whiteknuckle the armrest (of course I was driving -- I had my permit, and was two days away from getting my license), jumped out, slammed the door, and huffily stomped up the walkway to our front door. I was probably muttering some disrespectful expletives in the masterful teenage girl way, as I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and was greeted with a chorus of "SURPRISE!!!"

Frightening, no?

My first, and only, to date, surprise party was thrown by my family and a large group of friends, most of which were matching their respective dates to the Sadie Hawkins dance. I had not suspected a thing (hence my increasingly bad attitude with each stomp up to the front door). But the biggest surprise would come a bit later, when the doorbell rang, and a full sized gorilla entered the house with a balloon, waiting to sing me Happy Birthday. I couldn't believe it.

Katie, Tawnya, Jasmine, me, Jamie, Derick, Jordan, Jen, Steve, Gorilla

Lauren, Amy, Ryan

Alec, Anita, Tarah, Nick, Brad

I'll always remember how awesome my birthday parties were growing up. My parents made a point of making my brother and me feel special and loved on our big days. My psycho, cross-dressing, tea partying, gorilla infested memories are treasured ones. Even if they are a bit frightening. 

Class of 2000 - The 10 Year Reunion

Two summers ago all the teen movies I enjoyed in the 90s collided with all the returning-to-your-hometown-to-find-nothing's-changed movies I've enjoyed as an adult -- into one tragically entertaining though slightly unbelievable event:

 my Ten Year High School Reunion.

     

It all started the year before the reunion would take place. One of my best friends, Lauren, was our senior class president back in 2000, and she had come to the realization that SHE was supposed to be in charge of coordinating this bittersweet event (bitter because WTH, we'd already been out of high school for ten freaking years? and sweet because we couldn't wait to see everyone we'd graduated with so we could ridicule them). She asked if I'd be willing to help out when the time came.

Lauren wasn't enthralled with the idea of planning this once-in-a-lifetime event, having a toddler at home and being due to give birth to her second son a mere months before the party. I agreed, despite my lack of party planning skills, simply because I wanted to help my friend, and because I did want there to be a reunion (no party = no classmate ridiculing).

The start of 2010 rolled around and the passing decade must have flipped a switch in some of the 2000 grads, because I ended up getting Facebook messages from not one, but two, of the girls I graduated with. Let's call them Humpty and Dumpty. Both of them knew Lauren was the officiant, but Lauren, genius that she is, does not have a Facebook account. These girls began assaulting Lauren through me. Both of them requested Lauren's email address (which I only gave them once I'd asked Lauren's permission) and proceeded to tell me that if there was anything we needed while planning this no doubt amazing party, to PLEASE let them know.

What happened over the next couple months went like this:

1. Humpty and Dumpty, along with a handful of their Class of 2000 friends, completely took over the reunion planning. Just ripped it right out from Lauren's and my grasp. (Ok... we weren't holding on very tightly.)
2. Via Facebook (of course) I was bombarded, as was the rest of our class, with messages, posts, and embarrassing pictures from senior year, as the morbid countdown began. 
3. We were charged a ludicrous amount of money to attend our small town high school reunion.

I'll pick up a couple weeks before the event:

Lauren, Jasmine, Erin, and I had decided that we simply had to attend this party celebrating our aging process in a group. It was the only way we'd all survive. Every time we saw each other during this pivotal countdown stage, we'd make comments of disdain toward the event itself, as well as the self-inflicted "party planners". (I know, we were jerks... we didn't want the responsibility or to put in the work, but made fun of the people who did... it was fun.)

There's a piece of information I should include here. Humpty and Dumpty were part of the Class of 2000 "cool crowd". Meaning they were the "popular" girls who'd always thought they were better than everyone else despite all other categories of students staunchly disagreeing. The irony lies in the fact that Humpty didn't join our class until middle school (being a fresh-faced new 6th grade girl, she obtained an 8th grade boyfriend almost immediately and could be observed making out with him any given break); Dumpty came along in high school and finagled her way into the cool crowd much to most of our amazement (some people have a gift for convincing the Mean Girls that they're cool enough hang... either that or said Mean Girls must always have dorkier girls flitting around in order to make themselves look better... hence the permission to join). There were 73 other girls who actually attended Templeton Schools from kindergarten or first grade on (including myself and my entire group of friends). But that's cool... let the newbies plan our reunion. (No really, let them... remember, we didn't want to.)

Within a week before the main event, our class received a mass email informing us that when we showed up at the site, we would be required to pay an extra ten dollars per couple because the party planning geniuses had not brought in enough money for their legendary party. Real classy. Jon was beyond annoyed because he already thought the admission price was ludicrous for a party he'd rather be strung up by his toenails and tickled with razorblades than attend. But we got to pay ten MORE dollars!

Let the fun begin!

2010 Re-creation of a truly amazing Freshman Homecoming photo from 1996

The day of the reunion finally arrived, and our group had made plans to meet at Jasmine's house for a cocktail party before zero hour. I showed up even earlier to get ready. You know, like Prom? Our entourage of eight caravanned to River Oaks Hot Springs Spa in Paso Robles. This place has several buildings, and is actually quite a beautiful place to hold a wedding or other important lifetime event... like a class reunion. The problem was, the Party Planning Committee had booked the building that has no walls. It's a shelter. It has a bar. But it has no walls. It's on a hill. In Paso Robles. In August. At 7:00 pm, it was freezing. All the girls had done what all 28-year-old women do when they want to impress their former classmates -- worn sassy dresses and heels without sweaters.

We irritably handed our extra money over to Humpty and Dumpty at the entrance as we took in the scene. A cluster of tables, a buffet style food area cutting the room in half, and another cluster of tables. The wind blew through this place like a hurricane was coming as we hastily sat down at a table together. Jasmine, Kim, Erin, Steve, Lauren, Nick, Jon, and I stuck together, not too interested in mingling with the other 2000ers. We were having so much fun already, why would we break up our party to join the real party thrown by the Mean Girls? Besides, we were shivering too much to move. Except to retrieve some wine from the bar, of course. (Which was, by the way, being served by individuals -- younger siblings or underclassmen with residual fear of the Mean Girls, perhaps? -- who either had no practical experience pouring wine, or knew how badly we'd need it permeating our bloodstreams in order to endure the night... when Jasmine and Kim returned with their first round, their glasses were benevolently filled to the rims. No complaints.)

From this point on, it seemed as though no one was in charge. Eventually people awkwardly started to filter through the food line. Chicken, vegetables, bread. Nothing offered was gag-inducing, but it certainly felt like we were pilfering through boring wedding reception food... that we'd paid $65 for. After the meal we decided to get up and mingle. We had seen people we legitimately wanted to talk to, and figured we could do some laps around the room, maybe even some jumping jacks, in order to increase our body temps.

I was able to catch up with at least three (I know, SCORE!) people I'd graduated with that I truly hadn't seen, talked to, or stalked on Facebook since 2000. Pleasant conversation was had. I just made sure to stay away from the other side of the room, in which Humpty, Dumpty, Shauna (yes, that Shauna), and other assorted Mean Girls meandered about together. I glanced around the room and noticed that, not only were there hardly any people there, but most of the attendees were grouped in the same exact circles one would have found them ten years ago in the upperclass quad. No encouragement to mix these circles together and get people talking... the Mean Girls were too busy talking to each other, as usual.

At some point a Mean Girl, who interestingly enough helped Humpty and Dumpty plan the reunion, and is an actual party planner (like, that's her CAREER), yelled at everyone to make their way over to a sketchily-rigged up screen that kept blowing over in the wind. It was time to watch the slideshow! Months back, one of Dumpty's thousands of e-mails had requested we send her pictures from high school, or current pictures of us with fellow grads we still spent time with. I'd sent her six pictures, including one of Lauren, Jasmine, and me in fourth grade. I had tried to choose pictures I had with different people, knowing Dumpty couldn't include ALL the pictures people would send and it'd be good to have as many grads represented as possible.

Cue the music from She's All That, because now it becomes a real life nineties movie.

The slideshow began. Humpty with her friends; Dumpty with her friends; Mean Girls; Dumpty; group of dorks; Dumpty; Mean Girls; Mean Girls; one of my pictures; Humpty and Dumpty together... on the pattern went until the 15 people left at the party started to look around at each other, flabbergasted. Are they serious? we all inquired of each other silently. The slideshow ended and a few of us in the back just started busting up. This was the lamest and coldest party we'd ever been to, and we'd just been shown a personal history, in photos, of the party planners.

There was a total of 35 people at this party (I believe we had about 150 people in our graduating class), which obviously included people's DATES, such as my own husband, who did not attend THS. It felt like it was about time to go, when one of us checked the time. "It's only 8:30!!" This epic party, taken over by Humpty, Dumpty, and a legitimate party planner, had been morbidly attended, and was only going to last an hour and a half!

Our group made the decision to continue our party at the Crooked Kilt in downtown Paso, because we were all dressed up with nothing to do. Turns out everyone else from the reunion had the same idea. Almost every single person we'd seen at the party showed up at the Kilt... except the Mean Girls. Conversation commenced, drinks were poured, dancing ensued. I like to call it the Actual Class of 2000 Ten Year Reunion. It lasted until 2:00 am.

In 2020, I think we should just tell everyone to meet at a bar.

These poor girls don't know what awaits them in 14 years...

Truly amazing Freshman Homecoming photo from 1996

The Insane Asylum

I went to college in Santa Barbara. This didn't stop me from making a fairly regular trip up the 101, since I had a boyfriend back home, along with some of my best and most immature (i.e. "entertaining") friends. Lynnea likes to say that I came home every weekend, but I can assure you that in the three and a half years I spent at Westmont, I did stay and manage to get some work done (or tan myself) while I was there.

My group of hometown friends was a collection of mostly boys, Lynnea, the occasional other girl, and me. When you put a large group of 18- to 22-year-old boys, and girls who act like boys, together, you get mayhem. Every time.

One particular fall, this group had managed to discover that there was an abandoned insane asylum just sitting on a hill in San Luis Obispo. We believed this meant the building was asking for us to break into it. Even if that's not what it meant, it's what we did.

Creepy even in broad daylight

The gang had already done this a couple times before I was able to come up and join in the criminal activity. One Friday night, I tagged along as our caravan drove discreetly up the hill with our headlights off. We proceeded to hike up a hill, around the back of the building, climb a fence that butted up against the wall, and hop onto the roof. This is where it gets very sketchy. And illegal. (I believe we'd already entered the trespassing zone, but being found inside the building could not have been played off very well.)

As the last of our group was pulled up onto the roof, one of the boys pulled out the screwdriver he'd brought for the occasion. There was a board crudely screwed onto a few-feet-square hole, on the flat, plank-like roof on which we all stood. Once the board was removed, someone (a boy) had to descend into the hole, scale a crumbling, inches-wide mantel (apparently our entry point was right above a once-cozy living area with a fireplace), and shimmy down to the floor; then help every other person jump-climb into the room with him.

My first night exploring this deserted, skeleton of a place, once populated with what I could only imagine were people just like Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was frightening. I don't do scary movies. My imagination just doesn't allow me to forget the scenes burned into my brain when I see horrific things. I can't even really handle scary books, since what my imagination conjures is sometimes worse than movies. Tip-toeing around this place was a real-life scary movie. We were asking to be brutally murdered. (Or at the very least asking to get asbestos poisoning... there were signs all over the place.)

The tiny rooms were beyond creepy, and picturing the people who were locked in them years ago with blank stares and the glowing insanity seeping out of them was almost too much for me. Each cell had a tiny opening that we assumed had been used to push food through. We even "toured" the basement, which required us to bend over and crouch-walk through the dank, musty darkness, struggling to see one step in front of us as the first person in line shone their weak flashlight ahead. Our group mostly stayed together, which made the settling-house creaks even more terrifying, since the only explanation was that the spirits of psychotic mental patients were prowling around the floors above us.

After skulking through the halls of this ancient house-of-crazy for a couple hours, our party made its way back to the Living Room and each person got pushed up through the roof, leaving the last person to climb like a monkey back out of the hole. The board was carefully positioned and screwed back into place.

It took a few more hours and good night's sleep for the spooky to wear off. It honestly felt like I was wearing creepy as a second skin.

*                    *                    *

The next day, three of the "core" boys in our posse of delinquents came up with an epic plan... It was simple: Jon (yes, the man I married), Mitch, and Abel (on again/off again boyfriend -- off at the time) were going to scare the BAJEEZUS out of the rest of us. We had agreed to return to the asylum that night, the second night in a row, and bring a few people who hadn't seen it yet. This included Lynnea's older cousin, Robby, one of his friends, and our friend Cory. 

The boys would go to the asylum earlier in the day, paint one entire room (even the ceiling!) red, then come back with us that night, acting as if they had no clue how the room turned red in the 24 hours since our last visit. An added bonus: Abel would stay in SLO, and be inside the asylum before the rest of us showed up. We were to believe that he was "meeting us there later". His job, when he saw us walking up the path to the building, was to flicker a flashlight in one of the top floor rooms. 

To this day none of us can quite remember how each of us found out, but by the time we arrived at the asylum that night, the only people who didn't know about the plan were Robby and his friend, and Cory. Somehow the boys had let it slip to Nae and me, and word passed around to everyone except the three unknowing boys. All I can say is that it's a good thing I did know about Scare Our Closest Friends Into Insanity 2002, because even though I did know, I almost wet myself on multiple occasions.

*                    *                    *

We arrived at the asylum, and it was a perfect autumn night. Clouds blowing across the sky, alternately covering the moon, then allowing it to illuminate the asylum, casting demonic shadows as we crunched up the gravel path. The air was crisp, and crackling with excitement as we waited to see how the plan would unfold.

Right on cue, as we stood about fifty yards away, a light began flickering in one of the topmost windows. For good measure, one of us "in the know" said, "Uh... there's a light flashing up there." Everyone slowly turned their heads up toward the window. I was thoroughly creeped out, despite knowing exactly who was in there. Robby, obviously full of the heebie jeebies himself, exclaimed, "What the hell?" We all watched, some in mock, some in real horror, as the light continued to flicker, as if a fuse was shorting out. "Is there someone in there???" Robby was in the deliriously terrified phase, half laughing, half wanting to bolt back down the hill before a demon came down to snatch him into the hell house. 

THUD. Rocks started whizzing past us. Not close enough to hit anyone, but close enough to hear, and close enough to recognize that they were coming from the same top window. I thought, nice touch, as Robby let his alpha male take over and yelled, "Dude, if there's someone in there, I'm going to WRECK YOU!" Boys overcome fear by pretending to be tougher than the unknown source of horror. 

We stood in a huddle, trying to "decide" if we were brave enough to enter the place this time. All of a sudden, Abel walked up behind us, having come up the hill by the same gravel road we had. "Hey guys, what's going on?" The flickering and rock tossing had barely just ended... this guy was good. 

"Dude, there's someone in there!" Robby yelled. "Wait... where'd you come from?" 

"I just got here," Abel replied coolly, as the rest of us backed up his story that he'd come from the parking area, just in case. 

We stood in front of the house a bit longer, "waiting" for the haunting to continue, but when nothing else happened, the boys decided it was time to proceed. A few of them went around the back to get ready to climb the fence, and the rest of us slowly started trickling behind them. It was when Nae and I were passing the barred windows to the basement on the way around the house that my blood ran cold and my heart dropped into my stomach. A knocking sound was coming from underneath the house. This wasn't an older-than-dirt-house-settling creak, it was knocking. Nae and I looked at each other with true panic on our faces and raced around the corner to catch up with the boys. As I scanned our crowd, accounting for each person supposed to be with us, I froze. Everyone was here. Right here, in front of us. 

Not wanting to sound like the only girls in the group, that we were, Nae and I joined the males as we all jumped through the hole into the living room once again, trying to forget the sound we'd heard and what it could mean. Mitch, Abel, and Jon began the tour, showing Robby and the other newbies the place, as if they lived there. They took their sweet time, wanting the suspense to build before we finally came to The Red Room. 

"Guys... this room is RED." We enlightened ones looked into each others faces in shock (at this point I was in actual shock because the knocking I'd heard down below would not leave my consciousness). "Dude, we were just here last night... there was no red room." Mitch let the silence fall hard and heavy.

Robby's toughness took over again as he yelled, "IS THERE SOMEONE IN HERE??? COME OUT, I'LL KICK YOUR ASS!!"

As he and his friend began running up and down the halls, yelling and beating their chests like gorillas, I had to choose between stifling my laughter and my screams. The air felt thick to me, like there truly was a presence other than our own in that hallway. Each time one of the boys yelled, I squealed and grabbed Jon's arm, even though I knew the origin of The Red Room. I could not shake the memory of the unaccounted for sound beneath the house, and the feeling that something evil was in the building with us.

One of many rooms we wandered through.

Finally, one of the boys decided it was time to get out. We made our way back to the fireplace quickly, sometimes pushing another person out of the way, not a one of us wanting to be the last in line, as we filed back up through the hole, jumped down the fence, and ran back around the house. Our blood pressure returned to normal, and our adrenaline rushes morphed into hunger, so we did what all hungry college kids do: bolted to Taco Bell. 

Once we had returned to civilization, as we ordered our food and sat around in the awful florescent lighting that defines Taco Bell, I started to feel normal again. The air had thinned back out, and the heavy presence I sensed inside the asylum was gone. Halfway through our meal, something caught Cory's attention on the floor. 

"Abel. What's on your shoe?" 

We all glanced down and the table went silent. There, accusingly caked on the side of Abel's shoe, was a streak of red paint. 

A shadow of recognition darkened over Cory's face. The rest of us glanced around the circle, smirks threatening to fight their way onto our current masks of ignorance. Robby, appreciative of our elaborate prank, started cracking up, but Cory, with a look of death, only had one thing to say to us. 

"I hate you guys." 

Upon scanning the Internet for pictures of the asylum, I discovered that the brick building, built in the 20s,  may have at different times been an asylum, an orphanage ("Sunny Acres"), a juvenile detention center, and/or a TB clinic... different people have different information. One thing stuck out in my reading: most people who have been there believe it's haunted. 

Stalking Finn

I haven't had too much experience with famous people. For the longest time my best story was that as a deli girl at Eagle Market, I made Josh Brolin and Diane Lane their sandwiches twice. This was well before Josh's resurgence as a real movie star with No Country for Old Men, and an Oscar nomination for Milk... I knew him from Goonies and Thrashin'. (What is Thrashin', you ask? Well, my friends, here's the synopsis given on IMDb.com: "Two skateboarding gangs battle each other for supremacy, and a member of one gang falls in love with the sister of his rival." I think that's all you need to know. Oh, also, it was made in 1986. Yup. I own it if you want to borrow it.)

I didn't know who Diane Lane was. When the pair chose Eagle Market for their sub sandwich needs and stopped in, I thought she was a child (she's extremely short and wasn't wearing any makeup) and Josh looked like a confirmed Lake Rat. Tattered boardshorts, a foul wifebeater, and greasy long hair made for a "celebrity" that I just wasn't too impressed with at the time. (If only I'd kept his sandwich order form... I'd have his autograph!)

This all changed the night my friends Jasmine and Erin took me out for my birthday a few weeks ago. We spent a pleasant afternoon in Cambria and planned on finishing the evening at Erin's apartment in San Luis with a low key dessert and TV watching spree. In the car on the way to the coast, I suddenly remembered something.

Me: "Oh! Lynnea told me that a band is playing at SLO Brew tonight named Bonnie Dune... one of the guitar players is a guy we knew in high school, and their drummer is FINN."

Jasmine: (confused look) "Like, he looks like Finn?"

Me: "NO. HE IS FINN. Cory Monteith is THEIR DRUMMER."

Jasmine: OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WE HAVE TO GO!!!

Erin: (thought bubble) My friends are certifiably retarded. And who is Finn?

If you don't watch Glee, you won't know who Finn is. Glee has become one of my favorite shows over the last couple years... as over-the-top ridiculous and at times inappropriate and unrealistic as it can be, I think the underlying message is sweet. And I'm a sucker for musical theater. Finn is the male lead in the show's high school Glee club. His character is dense, but cute, and he is a talented drummer. And he was GOING TO BE PLAYING AT SLO BREW IN MERE HOURS.

After deciding to head straight to Downtown SLO to see if we could finagle some tickets to this no doubt epic show, we drove past SLO Brew to find a line almost around the block, full of high school girls, waiting to get in two hours early. At that moment, we changed our plans and proceeded to Erin's abode, where we figured we would partake in our originally scheduled, tranquil girls' night in.

It only took about fifteen minutes in Erin's apartment after tossing down our purses and lounging on the couch/chair/floor before Jasmine said, "So... maybe we should go get dessert downtown and walk around. Maybe he'll be down there."

I immediately concurred and felt my pulse rise at the thought that we could just run into a famous person downtown. Not just any famous person, but the male lead in one of my favorite shows. Luckily Erin is up for anything, and despite not being a regular Glee viewer, and not knowing who in Zeus' name Finn was, she thought dessert sounded like an excellent idea.

Frozen yogurt is always my dessert of choice, and since it was my birthday celebration, I got to choose. This turned out to be a providential selection.

We had just arrived at the foot of the brick staircase leading up to Sephora, Yogurt Creations our end goal, when Jasmine and I both looked across the street at the exact same time. Three boys, all dressed in slim jeans, hoodies, and hiding their faces behind dark sunglasses were strutting abreast down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. They were the only people on that side of Higuera, we were the only people on our side. They must have noticed us gawking.

One of them stood out because he was a head and shoulders taller than the other two.

"That looks like him!" Jasmine hissed through clenched teeth.
"It DOES look like him!" I hissed back.
"Should we follow him?"
"Let's follow him!!!"

At this point we knew we were stalking Cory Monteith, but that's all we knew. To where would we end up following him? Would we say something if he turned around and noticed us? What if he filed a restraining order against me? On my birthday?

None of these questions were important enough to abort the mission. We crossed the street as quickly as we could and kept about a block between the band posse and us. At one intersection, the big red hand started counting down obnoxiously at us. I was a few steps ahead of the other girls (my enthusiasm getting the best of me), and there was no way we'd all make it across in time. "Go!" they yelled at me, "We'll catch up!" (Thank goodness it was my birthday or my friends may not have put up with my ridiculous teeny bopper antics.) I ran ahead, and soon enough Garden Street was upon me. SLO Brew was around the corner, along with the doubled-in-length line of amped up sixteen year old girls. How ironic, I thought to myself, he just walked by all the girls who would trade their iPhones to see him up close, in person, and they don't even know! *evil mind chuckle*

Then: "Heather!!" From the middle of the line, two girls were calling my name. I stopped in my tracks, and squinting into the crowd, I noticed two of the Junior girls I counsel at church waving me over. I sprinted up to them, and panted, "No time!... I'm... stalking... FINN!!" They looked at me with "Whatever" looks on their faces and said, "Oh yeah, look at this," simultaneously shoving their phones and cameras into my face. They had already found Finn and taken pictures with him in line at Firestone! That's where he had been coming from when we spotted him across the street! "Well, FINE, I've gotta go!" I screamed at them, with just a tinge of jealousy.

I took a few lunges down the street, and spun on my heel as I approached Bubblegum Alley, frantically trying to pick up the scent once again. There, standing in the most disgusting tourist attraction known to man, was Cory Monteith with a group of four girls who had obviously been stalking him just as silently and jungle cat-like as I had been. Jasmine and Erin had caught up with me by now, and Jasmine was pushing me into the gum-encrusted alley, "Go ask him for a picture!" I tossed her my camera like a hot potato and as the other girls walked away giggling and twittering (so immature), I walked up to him and asked quietly, suddenly feeling like a 13 year old girl with a crush on the most popular boy in school, "Can I take my picture with you?" He gave me a lopsided Finn grin and said, "Yeah!" and proceeded to put his arm around me for the photo op. Jasmine made a funny quip as she took the picture about what a nasty place we were standing in, and even had the presence of mind to ask if he'd been to San Luis before. I stood there smiling silently like a developmentally delayed moron until it was time to say dumbly, "Thank you," and watch him walk away.

I was on a high for hours following my first experience as a true-to-life creeper, unable to process the fact that I had not only seen Finn, but followed, cornered, taken a photo with, and touched the love handles belonging to Finn. I had been closer than I'd ever been to famous person... a famous person I cared about! One I watched sing, dance badly, and misunderstand big words EVERY WEEK!

The night ended with Jasmine and me attending the Bonnie Dune concert (along with all the boppers we'd seen earlier, but added to the mix were 45-year-old moms with telephoto lenses... Finn would much rather a girl like me stalk him, right? Right?), which turned out to be a fabulous show.

Needless to say, I have a much more exciting "famous person" story now, but as my brother-in-law Dave pointed out, people like me are "why he was wearing a hoodie".

Roommate Woes & Broken Toes

College is a time in life brimming with extremes. During my freshman year, I alternated between tomfoolery with brand new friends and sitting miserably in the corner of my cell block dorm room in a state of depression, desperately missing my family and friends at home.

One of the most amusing things about college is finding out who you will be bunking with all year. I attended Westmont College in Santa Barbara, and bless the housing staff, they sent out contact information toward the end of the summer preceding my Freshman year. I was able to talk to both of my roommates on the phone about a month before actually meeting them. No, a ten minute phone call does not give you a true idea of who a person is, but it made us feel much more at ease when we did meet face to face on Move-In Day.

Sharing a room is a challenge. Especially when you've had your own room your whole life, and are suddenly expected to share a room no bigger than your bedroom at home, bulging with twice as much furniture, with two other people. People you've never met.

Sara, me, & Misty: our first day together... Page B 316

Misty was the first roomie I encountered. She was settling into our room in Page B when my family and I showed up. A musical theater student who dreamed of living in New York City one day, Misty and I didn't seem to have a whole lot in common at first. We still joke that if we'd attended the same high school, we may have never even met, let alone become friends. Misty was outgoing, organized, confident, talented, and seemed very excited to begin our first year.

Sara showed up later. Sara was a sweet Catholic girls' school graduate who was very clearly, even from the first day, attached to her family. She was apprehensive at first, and seemed much more hesitant about starting school away from home. She was a health nut who ran at least four miles every day, like clockwork, and never put any kind of sweet treat in her mouth. She called her mom once a day, finished her homework weeks in advance, and started listening to Christmas music in October.

We discovered immediately that we each had very different schedules. Sara went to bed at nine and woke up at dawn whether she had class or not. I was the middle ground, finishing my homework somewhat late and turning in around eleven each night. Misty was our room's night owl, partly because of her internal rhythm and partly because she had night rehearsals for the plays in which she always earned starring roles, and couldn't start her homework until midnight some nights.

Me, Sara, Misty, & our next door neighbor
and dear friend, April... Winter Formal 2000

Another reality we quickly became aware of was the difference in our individual perceptions of "clean" and "chores". Misty and I had a respectable handle on keeping things tidy, and it drove us batty when our tiny room became even tinier with the haphazard placement of Sara's piles of dirty clothes and free weights. We learned that Sara had never done her own laundry at home when she asked us how to use the machines downstairs, and had to be told to separate her whites and colors. After a month or two of living together, Misty and I realized that we were the only ones taking out the trash and borrowing the third floor's shared vacuum (it took an average of 45 seconds to vacuum our room, since only about three and a half square feet of carpet showed). We passively aggressively experimented with "waiting to see how full the trash can could become" and "how many hairballs will get stuck between her toes" before Sara noticed and took it upon herself to contribute to our room's hygiene. This never worked because she never noticed. Misty or I, without fail, would either become so frustrated at throwing a piece of paper onto the top of our trash mountain, only to have it roll right back to us, or become nauseated by the smell of Sara's daily banana peels rotting in the can. One of us would eventually give in and huffily yank the bag out, tie it up as loudly as possible, and stomp out, hoping she'd perceive the hints. She didn't.

Misty finally had a brilliant idea: she fashioned a chore chart and taped it to the wall by the door. Yes, the same kind of chore chart you'd find on the refrigerator of a family with preschool children. The three of us rotated through the two chores required to keep our room livable, but we found that when it was time to complete our duties, we still had to prod Sara to do her share. (The first time she took out the trash, weeks after school had started, we had to tell her where the dumpster was.) As ridiculous as it seemed for three eighteen-year-olds to need a chore chart, it seemed to help get Sara involved.

 Outside study session SUNBURNS

The differences in opinion over acceptable living conditions came to a head one day in the spring. Things had gotten tense in the room. The weather had changed, tricking our brains into thinking it was summer, classes had gotten more demanding as teachers assigned even more homework, and the novelty of roomies-turned-built-in-besties had long since faded. The walls of our small living space were closing in on us, and the once seldom occasion that all three of us needed to be in the room at the same time grew increasingly more common, putting us all on edge. We were working furiously on homework one afternoon, when I heard Misty push her chair back behind me, and pad across the room to her closet. On the way back to her desk, I heard a dull THUD followed immediately by Misty's high pitched screeching. "SARA!!! WHAT ARE YOUR WEIGHTS DOING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM?!?!" She hobbled over to her chair and sank into it, her face red and her eyes glistening with tears of pain. (We were told later by our friend next door, April, that she was also studying and could hear everything.) Misty grabbed her foot and pulled it into her lap, inspecting the toes she had bashed into Sara's misplaced exercise equipment. Misty ultimately had to go to the health center and was told she'd broken her pinkie toe. Sara's constant state of disarray had finally resulted in a casualty: one of Misty's precious phalanges! 

Even after an entire school year, Sara still needed to be schooled in certain aspects of household cleanliness... and simple biology. Another day in spring, when the three of us were once again sharing our minuscule workspace to study, I was violently shaken from an enlightening chapter of my American History book to hear, "Sara! Why did you just throw your contact on the floor?!" (It was obvious by Misty's tone that she was absolutely disgusted.) I turned to see Sara sheepishly looking at Misty, her contact lens case and bottle of solution sitting accusingly on her desk. I could just barely make out the reflection of the overhead light in the tiny half moon on the floor, which had apparently been dropped on purpose. Sara looked back and forth at both of us, confused and defensively, before replying in all seriousness:

"It's okay! They're biodegradable!!"
 
I'm not sure how we survived that year together, but we did, and were able to remain friends. I'm assuming by now, ten years later, all of our living conditions and housecleaning skills have improved. I haven't visited Sara's house in Colorado, though... there is a possibility that she has a room with a pile of crusty, used contact lenses on the floor, waiting to biodegrade...

Sink or Swim... or Get Eaten

In 2005, Lynnea and I were quite possibly the two most fascinating girls in the world. Or at least in our group of friends.... which consisted of boys... and us.

After I graduated from Westmont and returned home, I did what all college graduates do: I found a job that required hardly any of my schooling or qualifications, and played with my friends every conscious hour that wasn't spent actively in the workforce. I became an aide at a preschool, even though I had enough units to be a teacher (which could have gotten me $2.50 more an hour, but what did I know?); this meant that I got thrown up on, peed on, pooped on, I wiped man-sized boogers off tiny faces, and cleaned up toddler-generated messes in an infinite cycle. But I digress.

Being twenty-two or twenty-three years old yielded my friends and me a super power that if I'd realized I had at the time, I would have appreciated it more emphatically: we could get up at the butt crack of dawn, work an eight or nine hour day, and proceed to engage in countless extra curricular activities until we couldn't hold our eyes open and felt like collapsing. Then we'd start over again the next day. Our main group during this time consisted of four boys who lived together: Mark, Justin, JJ, and Andrew; and Jon, Lynnea, and me.

Lynnea and I had been friends since high school. I first remember meeting her at youth group, when we were both in the 8th Grade Girls small group, then shared a cabin at Hume Lake the same summer. She'd attended Atascadero schools, like everyone else, and I was the lone Templeton kid. It was akin to being a homeschooler as far as the A-town contingent was concerned. Nae was nice to me back then, and I remembered that later, when our mutual group of friends brought us together again.

By college, we'd realized how incredibly alike we were. We had the same sarcastic, biting sense of humor (which was very hard to find in the church college group girls... very hard), we could be around each other every waking moment without driving each other insane, and we didn't like to sit still for too long. To each other, we were the sisters neither of us actually had. The rest of our friends were always boys, because in general we enjoyed doing more active and extreme things than most of the other girls we knew. We rock climbed, skate boarded, biked, played dune tag, hiked mountains in the pitch dark, explored old mining shafts, broke into a dilapidated and fenced off insane asylum... and surfed.

I bought an old longboard from a friend for $5 (he just needed lunch money that day), and Nae ordered a custom-made board from CCS that featured her signature purple swirled into it. I purchased myself a used wetsuit I'd seen in the classifieds that took exactly an hour and half to squish myself into. Once it was on I experienced a perpetually-being-strangled-feeling and I couldn't move my arms. But at least I was a fraction of a degree warmer whenever I plunged into the Pacific. Nae even traded in her purple Toyota Tercel for a small Nissan pick-up truck... for the sole purpose of transporting our surfboards.

Our goal was simple. Once we got the hang of things, we would graduate from our plank-like long boards to a couple of sleek, sharp-nosed short boards that, under our precise guidance, would slice through the water like perfectly placed arrows. Were we slightly delusional due to our obsession with a popular film from 2002, Blue Crush? Maybe. Who doesn't want to have a career as a hotel maid, as long as you get to live on the North Shore of Oahu and moonlight as a professional, sponsored surfer girl?

This fantasy led to our decision that we needed to train. How could girls like us, with noodles for arms and eight-foot-long surfboards to maneuver, ever survive two hours of paddling out, let alone an entire Vans Triple Crown competition? We'd already mastered the "pop-up" and could actually get up fairly consistently, as long as the waves were no bigger than approximately two and a half feet.

We both had boogie boards and hypothesized that paddling around on them for a few hours every weekend would build the upper body strength required to become bona fide surfing phenoms.

That's where this story of terror begins.

We chose our surf spots based on the food selection in close proximity... Splash Café, a favorite of both of ours, was right up the street from Pismo Pier. So that's where we began our training. Neither of us had ever had a problem with the ocean. We loved playing in it as kids, and as big kids/young adults, we had the ability to swim or paddle out to imposing depths without hesitation. This particular day, we sloshed through the shallow white water, jumped onto our boogie boards, and began paddling out to the decent sized waves. We rode waves in, paddled out, rode them in, paddled out. Sure, we were getting tired, but we had our futures as Billabong Girls to think about. We'd probably been out for less than an hour when we both saw a giant shadow streak through the wave forming right next to us.

Let me clarify something here. In the summer of 2003, SLO county suffered the only shark attack from my lifetime that I remember hearing about. It involved a twelve to eighteen foot great white, a woman who routinely swam laps in Avila Beach's calm waters, and it was fatal. Lynnea, Jon and I immediately rented Jaws and proceeded to be bored out of our minds watching it (our memories had failed to remind us that Jaws is story-driven, and the lack of bloody action did nothing to quench our presently morbid fascination with shark attacks). Needless to say, the attack had happened a couple years prior, and no others had occurred. So the two of us had no qualms about plunging into the water mere miles away from the attack site.

Despite this lack of fear, I assume I don't have to explain exactly where our minds jumped when we saw an immense, fish-shaped shadow whiz past us, our puny, weak, seal-costumed human bodies becoming glaringly apparent.

One of us may have yelled "SHARK!!!", but that might have been my own thoughts pounding loudly against my skull. I also may have said (trying desperately not to become hysterical), "It's probably a dolphin! Is it a dolphin?!" All I know is that the second time the shadow shot past us, we abandoned any pretense of bravery and instantly began flailing in the water, attempting to "swim" back to shore with all our limbs in tact and no blood loss.

Nae was an accomplished swimmer in high school, and much shorter than I. Logically, I knew that if the shark got anywhere near us, the long legs hanging off my sluggish body would be the first morsels to be devoured. We kicked urgently and propelled our hands into the sea, digging in and pushing desperately against the water's resistance, our hearts punching our ribcages so hard that all sea life on the West Coast could probably hear them.

All at once, we realized after less than a minute (that seemed like hours) of swimming as fast as we possibly could, we had hardly moved any closer to to the beach. Hysteria set in and we started howling with frantic laughter, knowing that we could both die at any moment. As we tried not to suck down ocean water, gasping for breath between panic stricken guffaws, we slowly but surely doggie paddled back to shore. Adrenalin pumping through my veins, I spastically spun on my heel to survey the water. I wanted to see if our "buddy" was still visible. Then I saw it: the friendly, curved, gray fin, along with a gust of moist air being forced through a blow hole. "SHARKS DON'T HAVE BLOWHOLES!!" I screamed triumphantly. As our delirious laughter continued, a real surfer trudged through the sand toward us, holding his short board in the crook of his elbow. Looking at us with tremendous concern, he inquired, "Dude, did you guys see the shark?!?"

Nae and I just turned to each other and giggled as he walked away, our hearts still regulating themselves back to a normal rhythm. "Want to get some chowder?"

The Reunion - Part Two

Ahhh, Facebook... the double-edged sword.

Some days it is the bane of my existence. Friend requests from people I hardly talked to in high school, some I may have met once through a mutual friend, and occasionally even a person I have truly never met in my entire life. Status updates such as "I am now at home" (neat), "Little Timmy finally pooped in the big boy potty!" (gross), or "Oh no you didn't just say that to me." (how passive aggressive)... it's to be expected from teenagers, and even the early-twenties crowd, they feel entitled to have their voices heard. But those of us pushing thirty, and up: No one cares. No one. 

Then there's the positive side: being a part of friends' lives who have moved to different states, following pictures of rapidly growing babies and children, having things to talk about with real friends you haven't seen lately and the ability to still feel connected. And there's always the possibility of a reconnection.

That brings us back to Jasmine, Erin, and me. Jasmine had been a professional dancer, traveled the world, and lived in the Pacific Northwest before making her way back to her hometown; Erin spent years in the Bay Area after graduating from Cal Poly before migrating home; I had moved home after graduating college in Santa Barbara, gotten married, taught elementary school for a couple years, and had a baby. We had all come from, and were currently in, very different places in life. But one day, soon after Erin had moved back to SLO, she sent out a Facebook message suggesting a get together. A very casual coffee date.

At that time, Jasmine and I had practically been neighbors for over a year, but due to very different lives, and settling into our niche with the hometown friends we'd already connected with, we simply hadn't made plans together. I would literally pass her house several times a week, pushing my jogger and occasionally waving as she cruised by in her car, or honking as I rolled by her adorable white farmhouse on Santa Rita Road.

Erin returned to SLO county and was ready to mingle, and she is one to make things happen. She got us off our complacent butts and we committed to a coffee date. I was more than a little nervous. I was the only married one, and also had a just-turned-one year old daughter. Some people truly don't know what to talk about unless they are in the exact same life stage, and I was ready to let the other two talk about their fabulous young, "single" lives without boring them with my mommy stories. An even worse theory went through my brain as well: What if we have nothing to say to each other? Thank God for Kealani, the one-year-old circus act... if nothing else we could just watch her be herself, which can entertain even the most anti-kid Scrooges for hours.

On St. Patrick's Day in 2010, the three of us, plus Kealani, met up at Amsterdam Coffee in Paso Robles (now one of my all time favorite places to relax and chat with friends). The hesitation that we (but maybe just I) had felt almost instantly melted away as we began to catch up on each others' lives. Boy, had we missed a lot. The fear of living too different a life from the other two faded as conversations that included three unique perspectives commenced, and our time together passed as quickly as a midnight train. When Kealani's dinner and bedtime crept up and we had to part ways, we dragged our feet, not wanting the reuniting to end. The three of us decided that we needed to make meetings a regular affair. Especially since our ten year high school reunion was quickly approaching (the subject of which may or may not have been 50% of our conversation that particular night) and we needed moral support from each other in order to even consider attending.

What began as a leap into the unknown - meeting old friends I'd known well at one time, being unsure that there would be any common thread holding us together anymore - resulted in the cultivation of two of the best friendships I could have ever imagined obtaining. The three of us are basically the same people we were in high school, minus the naivete, lack of self confidence, false wisdom, and acne (most of the time). We share a very similar sense of humor, basically the same view on relationships, and we each bring a sense of worldliness and experience to the table, due to travels and heartbreaks chalked up over the last ten years. There are times it feels like those ten years never passed, and that we didn't live completely separate lives for a whole decade. But some of the best dishing sessions include stories from that decade. Stories that we weren't together for, or even around to hear about. I think years will be spent catching up on the rest of those untold stories. In the meantime, we're authoring new stories, in which the moral is this: Some friendships are meant to last forever.

(Days before our class reunion last summer we got together and sat in Jasmine's living room in our pjs, grazing on Trader Joe's snacks and sipping wine while we browsed old yearbooks... Inserted here will be the message I wrote in Jasmine's 2000 yearbook at the end of our Senior Year... Currently that book is in a box somewhere.)

The Reunion - Part One

The three of us were in the same third grade class at Templeton Elementary School: Mrs. Hatfield's.

Jasmine and I noticed one morning that we had the same pair of K-mart black corduroy slip-on shoes on our feet. From across the classroom, we made eye contact, pointed at our shared fashion-forward statements, grinned, and one of us mouthed to the other, "Want to play at recess?!?" What followed was the blossoming of a tried and true friendship that included sleepovers, "scary" movies (Young Frankenstein, Clue, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein may not be found in the Horror section, but Psycho sure scared the bajeezus out of us), pool days, creating and performing plays and dance numbers, wearing our faded TES shirts and black pants on Fridays as we stood in line for our once-a-week Hot Lunch (burgers and fries with chocolate milk), binder organizing nights, mystery parties, the Older Sisters of Little Brothers Club, borderline certifiably insane boy-craziness, and our very own secret meeting place: Terabithia (a tree at the edge of Jasmine's property). Jasmine was an incredible dancer, and despite my own hesitation to become involved in a practice-every-day-of-the-week activity just yet, she took it upon herself to teach me some moves and choreograph routines that I could actually handle.

Erin and I shared our third-grade crush: Roy. This may have made us rivals of sorts at first, but I think we were ahead of our time, letting no man come between us strong, independent women. Many recesses were spent together (with Jasmine) sitting on the school's front lawn, where the old bell sat tempting countless eleven-and-unders to slip their hand under its dome and "discreetly" bang away on it before a yard duty could blow her screeching whistle at them. We spent time picking the red berries off the bushes in front of the office, and most likely talking about Roy's beautiful brown eyes. I remember lounging in Erin's bedroom, stroking her fluffy red cat, Sally, and making calls on her fabulous juicy-red-lip shaped telephone. Erin's dad reminded me of my own: a super cool rockstar with a goofy sense of humor, who had an enviable relationship with his daddy's girl. One night he showed me his record album of Alice Cooper and unknowingly introduced me to the mystery of guy-liner.

The eight-year-olds who became friends in third grade slowly but surely grew into adolescents. Berry picking and binder organizing transitioned into shopping trips to San Luis and lunches at Fresh Choice. Simple crushes were remodeled into infatuations-of-the-week and covert missions as we stalked boys around the gym each time a school dance was put on. Gone were the innocent days of being young girls, only to be replaced by the horror of cliques, glasses, braces, leg-shaving, self-chopped bangs, and more drama than we ever thought possible. Somehow we survived, and our friendships were still in tact. Bonus!

Finally, we entered high school, where the beginning stages of figuring out who we were began. At our small school, we all remained friends, while preserving other friendships we'd enjoyed since our elementary days, and accumulating new ones to add to our directory... depending on what activities we involved ourselves in and what classes we took. Many of my new friends were on my sports teams, but this didn't detract from my loyalties. Plenty of weekends were still spent at Jasmine's house, confiding anything and everything to each other, and I would forever have respect for Erin because of her amazingly sarcastic/genius sense of humor (my favorite) and the fact that she never compromised who she was just to be "cool".

Plenty of people who graduated from Templeton High School have a catch phrase: "Templeton's so small, we don't really have cliques."

Well... if "sporty", "brainy", "artsy", "druggie", and "girls-who-think-they're-better-than-everyone-else" sound like cliques to you, then THS had cliques. Lucky for most of us, the size of our class did make it easier to cross the barriers, and most students were identified with more than one of those groups. We'd all known each other for so long that we could still conduct decent, civil conversations with the Others. To say there were no cliques at all would be far too naive, though. I'm sure there are plenty of individuals from the class of 2000 out there who would consider their time in high school a special kind of hell.

Jasmine, Erin, and I considered ourselves "drifters", meaning we had cohorts in several different areas and got along just fine with all of them. The only one we avoided were the girls-who-think-they're-better-than-everyone-else. We simply mocked them behind their backs (some things never change... more on that in a later post: Class of 2000 Ten-Year Reunion suckas!!!)

The time came for everyone to go their separate ways. Our class was the first in a long while to have a high percentage of graduates to not only attend college, but go off in various directions. As is common, we lost close touch with those we had been closest to for so many years. New towns, new living arrangements, new roommates, new friends, new boys, and new lifestyles were distractions that made keeping up with our oldest friends more difficult than ever imagined. Occasional e-mails, even less frequent phone calls, and short visits during school breaks spent at home were opportunities to stay connected that grew fewer and farther apart every year. Eventually it happened: precious friendships had morphed into disconnected acquaintances.

Along came Facebook.

Elementary to Big Time

My parents wanted me to switch schools after fifth grade. Templeton had a middle school for the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders to attend. My dad taught in Atascadero, where sixth graders were still included in elementary school. In Atascadero, sixth graders were the big cheese: the sophisticated, oldest kids. In Templeton, sixth graders were puny eleven year olds walking around the same halls as fourteen year olds. That meant we were thrust into the same habitat as lanky, tall boys with funny voices and hulking girls with massive chests. I won the argument with my parents, despite their attempt to make me an elementary school baby for one more year. Who would I hang out with at Dad's school? Dad? No way! My real friends were in Templeton, and I needed to stay there.

Luckily most of my closest friends were in my core class. Even though we were in middle school, unlike the seventh and eighth graders our classes traveled together as we switched every period. I suppose this made the transition easier on the prepubescent small fries. My group at the time consisted of Lauren, Anita, and Tarah, as mentioned in previous posts (I seem to have plenty of memories from this year in school... maybe 7th and 8th grade were so horrific I had to block them out completely...?). Lauren and I had been pals since third grade, our parents had also become good friends, and we spent the bulk of our weekends at each others' homes; Anita was the tallest girl in sixth grade, with thick strawberry blond hair down to her butt, and though most people didn't know it due to her shyness, had a biting wit that far surpassed many full grown adults; Tarah was short and dark, polite, and earned the best grades (probably in the entire school). We were a tight group. We were also complete and total dorks, we just didn't know it.

We all decided we loved volleyball, and not only did we go out for the team that year, but I bought a really nice, official regulation size volleyball from K-Mart for about six dollars. (You have to be willing to spend some dough when you discover your calling.) We played with it every day at break, at least until one of the colossal eighth grade boys would invariably steal it from us and kick it across the blacktop. We'd simply take off and chase it, return it to the circle, and hope that if the predators realized it didn't phase us, they might actually throw it back to us the next time.

We had a homeroom teacher named Mrs. Hays. She was from Boston and said things like "di-ah-ree-er" in place of "diarrhea"; the boys made her say it at least seventeen times a day. Mrs. Hays had long blond hair, both on her head and on her upper lip. Whenever Mrs. Hays walked by our table, Anita pointed out the mustache, and Tarah responded with, "At least her mustache is blond and not black like mine." We had to agree.

Mrs. Hays was in tip top shape; she had even run the Boston Marathon a couple of times. She was always training for her next race, and she enjoyed taking off her shoes to let us see for ourselves how her big toe looked: like a juicy purple grape, ready to pop, right before the deteriorating nail fell off and made way for the new baby nail underneath. It was creation at its best.

Thank goodness I was allowed to attend middle school or I never would have added these experiences to my repertoire.

Freak to Friend to Foe

 Because who doesn't love remembering the awkwardness and friendship politics that define middle school?

One day we had a new girl come into our core class in the 6th grade. Her name was Shauna. Shauna had medium length blond hair that always looked like she had just taken it out of a braid, and bangs. She was built like a boy, walked like a football player, and had huge, muscle-bound thighs. (At this stage in life, I'd probably kill for thighs like that, but in 6th grade they were obscene.) Her perfectly straight, white teeth were overshadowed by the thick glasses that were supposed to allow her to see better and uncross her lazy eye. Unfortunately for Shauna, this didn't always happen.

Shauna annoyed everyone from the start. Not only did she disturb the equilibrium our class had developed into the school year, but she was distracting. She was funny looking, and everyone wanted to figure out what her lazy eye was looking at. I played this game once, watching the eye and guessing that it was zoomed in on the chair next to me... until Shauna fiercely whispered, "What!?" Apparently that time it was looking at me.

Shauna also thought she knew everything. At least as much as a freshman in high school. In history class, Mr. Lanes asked one day what we knew about plate tectonics. Shauna raised her hand and, with her nose in the air, replied, "Plate tectonics broke apart the original super continent, Pangaea."

Pan-what?

My friends and I looked at each other furiously as if to say, "who does One Eyed Willie think she is?"

When no one else was tolerant enough (or brave enough) to hang out with Shauna, my close-knit group from that particular year: Lauren, Anita, Tarah, and I found it in our hearts to let her into our squad. It actually worked out quite nicely for awhile. Shauna also liked volleyball, and had a pretty good sense of humor under those glasses. She also let me know when it was about time for me to start shopping for a training bra. That's real camaraderie. (Even if her tactic was whisper-screaming "OH MY GOD! YOU NEED TO BE WEARING A BRA!!" in front of half the class when I showed up to school one morning.) We had fun with Shauna and never treated her like the foreigner we had originally wanted to when she barged in on our class. She was our friend for a hefty chunk of the year, until she started to notice who the popular sixth graders were.

Little by little, we saw less of Shauna. She still played volleyball with us sometimes, and of course we saw her in class, but as the year went on our friendship with her fizzled out. Shauna, the cross eyed boy-girl with big legs, had been initiated into the cool crowd!

She got contacts and grew out her bangs. She started coming to school with brand names splayed across her blooming chest, and Airwalk shoes. She got to dance with the English Twins to Boyz II Men's "I'll Make Love to You" without getting ditched at the Valentine's Dance. My experience with them wasn't quite the same. (Chris told me he had to go to the bathroom and would be right back, never to return again... at least Pat danced with me for a whole song.)

We were amazed and slightly offended that after our extension of grace, Shauna would so easily pack up and leave us. Despite this, we went about our daily business, content with our original group.

The problems arose when Shauna decided she had suddenly been ordained with the authority to treat us like the dirt that the popular crew must have assumed we were. When we walked by, she'd make fun of us, and in class she'd shoot us death looks with one of her eyes. I couldn't believe it. Shauna had made the Transition and completely forgotten her dorky roots!

My first lesson in middle school politics was taught to me by this former friend. It was about getting to the top and looking good doing it... something Anita, Lauren, Tarah and I were just too naive to care about yet. I won't lie, the popularity game eventually became a priority to us as well. We all went through the phase, buying the "cool" clothes and weaseling our way into a conversation with one of the pretty girls or a good looking boy. Fortunately for us, we grew out if it in time for high school.