Let's Get Physical

1983. My 13th birthday. One of the few I really remember celebrating almost like normal kids did. My best friend Beverly spent the night, and I had a party with a bunch of other kids. Beverly was the cool girl with shockingly blond curly hair, blue blue eyes, cool Ocean Pacific t-shirts. She wore legwarmers over her pants legs, which then was the height of teen fashion. She had tons of cool pointy, colored earrings that I used to sigh over because my mom would not buy me cool clothes-- preferring instead the "value driven" K-Mart and Bebo's stuff. Beverly taught me how to wear eyeliner. She also was one of those girls the boys drool over because she developed boobs way earlier than the rest of us, but she was still very nice, and very self-conscious of her figure. (My mom didn't like her, either, which made it even better.)

Because my birthday is near Halloween, we had an orange-and green decorated Halloween birthday cake. There were nachos--complete with a crock pot filled with that bubbling, gooey, salty, too-orange-fake nacho cheese (mmmmmm), all the sodas we could choke down, videos, including Cheech & Chong and Student Bodies and one other special video.

At the time, we lived on the property of my mother's boyfriend's workplace. It was a petroleum hauling truck-company, but the office was a place that used to be a honky-tonk called the "Sugar Shack." The front room looked pretty much like any truck company office might. But the back, and the storage room, was still basically a big empty bar, minus tables or barstools-- concrete floor, lots of empty space, the slightest lingering tinge of cigarettes and stale beer. In short, somewhere a 13 year old would find inexplicably cool. I had begged to have my party there, and to my delight, was indulged. We had the TV/VCR, and a big table with all the great food. Boy & Girl (oooh-- a mixed party!) pre-teens clustered around the TV, giggling and hitting each other with pillows. Really. Yes, it was that cute.

All the way to the back of the room was what used to be the stage-- and this is one of the best parts of the story. The "stage" was now completely closed in by chicken wire. Yes. Just like in the Blues Brothers. It had an indoor-outdoor-carpet platform area, and shelves with tools and expensive stuff lining the edges and back. But the front was all wire, and a big wire door with a padlock. It was lit with exposed overhead fluorescent tubes. There was not a crowd of angry drunks throwing beer bottles, but there certainly was that incredible vibe that there could have been.

After watching videos, eating cake, nachos, laughing hilariously over Cheech & Chong's exploits, all the other kids left. Beverly and I got to spend the night in the back room, with sleeping bags and pillows. Including the glorious stage.


We had also rented Olivia Newton John's Physical video. Complete with strong women in hot pink and purple leg warmers and leotards prancing around with fitness equipment, rock hard male bodies gracing the screen briefly now and then.

Beverly & I spent a long time with the music cranked, in our PJs, dancing on the stage, holding fake microphones, having dragged the TV to the back of the room. We were Olivia. We were divas.

We eventually pulled our sleeping bags and pillows up on the stage too. We slept there after our hours of dancing and cake and cheese. It was the ultimate passage into teenager hood that I can imagine.

My mother, the next morning, was perplexed at finding us on the stage, bleary eyed and cranky and stiff necked from a night of sleeping on the hard floor. (We could have gone back to my room & canopy bed for a much more comfortable evening.)

But she could never have understood. We were DIVAS. Comfort was not necessary.