Auld Lang Syne

I just watched the tape of my 18th birthday party.

Matt the Miller Man was there, and Andy, who was directly responsible for Road Trip With ReadBecca: Oklahoma! Oklahoma! Oklahoma! Edition. I don't remember the party so much as I remember the party from the night before. And when Luis called me at noon and sang Happy Birthday to me in the worst hangover voice I have heard to this day, and I listened to the whole thing, which took forever, before I said a word because I always knew when it was Lou on the phone. Then we had to go downtown and decorate the ballroom at one of the hotels for the Favorites Dance because Matt was class president and volunteered our asses. I think Luis and I worked for maybe 25 minutes before we took off and ate chicken friend steak at the hotel restaurant. I paid for him.

He and Dave procured a bottle of vodka for Jimmy's Scamfest '89 party and we took shots out of the cap until I ended up laying on the deck without shoes or my letterman jacket, which had ended up being worn by Alison Chavez instead, and it was a rare cold night for South Texas, but then again my birthday is in February so 30 degree weather isn't that strange, but anyway, I was drunker than I probably ever had been up until that point and I believe Andy carried me into the house and put me on the pool table, which sounds like the beginning of a Jodie Foster movie, but it wasn't, and I spent the rest of the night on the bathroom floor and some guy I didn't even know held my hair and at midnight Lou and Dave and Matt et al slammed open the pocket door and sang happy birthday to me, which I watched with my head at their feet so they looked upside down to me, and I said, "Aw, I love you guys!" It was a good party.

And the next day was the Favorites Dance which happened also to be my 18th birthday, so everyone came to my house after the dance for breakfast, and most everyone was there before I was because Hayden Hauser and I went parking first. I wonder whatever happened to him. We met in Texas Driving School. His parents were very nice to me. I used to go over and hang out with them even if Hayden wasn't home. He took me to my prom too.

Luis and Dave sang "You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin'" to me and I am so glad I have it on tape. Lou called me his best girlfriend. It's so sad we're not friends anymore. But the tape makes me smile. Barbara Pruitt gives Dave Garner a classic fuck-off look. Dave being Dave was always weird. Andy got a great shot of what a hottie I was at 18. If I had only known the power I had at that age. Jimmy Zimmerman was there, and George and Erin and Risa and Frank Hernandez of "as you wish" fame and who sat next to me at graduation and carried me out of the auditorium in his arms like a movie, and told me he loved me. I bet he doesn't remember. I remember Holly and I running out the doors into blinding sunlight. It was a perfect moment.

My party is followed by an ancient episode of Geraldo. It's got neo-nazis. And then Donahue. It's a time capsule from 1989 and Barbara Bush gets a shout out at my party. I was wearing my James Avery silver ring with the teddy bear charm that I got as a little girl, so I used to wear it on my pinky in high school. I don't remember what happened to that ring, but I wish I still had it. I have big hair on the tape. Someone asks me who did my hair and I said that my mom and I did it. My mom did my hair for a Coronets dance once and I look like Priscilla Presley in the pictures. My mom graduated high school in 1967. I don't remember going to a salon for any dance except the prom. That hair-do took like a hundred hair pins to accomplish. Not bobby pins, actual old-fashioned hair pins like my grandma used. You have to stick them in and then bend one side to make them stay, but once they are in, those sumbitches ain't coming out.

My dress was red and I got it in eighth grade for my cousin's wedding, but I took it to the seamstress who made our Tex-Ann pep rally outfits and had her turn it into a bubble dress, which has recently come back into style simply to freak me out, and turning it into a bubble dress made it really short and I had dyed-to-match red satin pumps. I was not named Class Flirt.

Sigh.