Torn

So, do you know that strange conflicted feeling you get when your college, angst, anti-establishment, fringe music is now MUZAK at the computer store in the mall?!!

I do.

Freestylin'... R-R-R-Random

While walking the dogs the other day, I spotted this in the grass and oddly enough, my mouth started watering. No, I'm not on the "starvation diet" - it was one of those forgotten memories from my youth that suddenly came flooding back. You see, I spent some time in the Air Force after high school. Don't believe me? Oooo... scary, huh?!! (Mrs. G, I hope you managed to escape that particular haircut.) One of my favorite Air Force experiences was S.E.R.E. training, which involves:
S. = Survival (how to live off the land)
E. = Evasion (how to avoid being captured in enemy territory)
R. = Resistance (not divulging secrets when they imprison you)
E. = Escape (yeah, right)

For "Survival", we learned cool stuff like: making a tent out of your rain poncho, how to kill and eat rabbits, finding and boiling water when you have NOTHING, the amazing taste of slowly "grilled" (over a lighter or match!) crickets and grasshoppers, figuring out where the heck you are, and, the one that triggered this whole thing, how heavenly it feels to come upon a wild strawberry when you've been subsisting on crickets and grasses for a couple of days!


p.s. the span of time between the Prom photo and the knife photo -
4 months, WOW!

What the heck... I'll play

We'll, everybody's all in "prom mode", so when Mommy's Martini launched the prom carnival, I figured "What the heck, I'll play." Only because this is one of my all-time favorite memories, AND it's not like I have 15 things I REALLY SHOULD be doing instead! :-)

So, we moved to Alabama the summer before my Junior year (Army brat), and shortly after school started, I managed to luck into dating him:

(shameless plug for gorgeous boyfriend)

But, by the end of that year we were no more, because I was all ego this and "you don't own me" that. Which is a real shame, because I truly loved him. Senior year was rocky, and we were on-again-off-again many times (due to my early-onset menopause), but when it came time for the Junior-Senior Prom, there was only one person I would go with - him. Senior Prom was just too special to me to be spent with anyone else. If the story ended there, it would have been the perfect romantic, fun-filled, best ever time I had in high school. But it was even better.

You see, my sister had a boyfriend, a true love, also. He was from somewhere up north, because, while the folks around him were like "Hey y'all", he was "youse guys" every other sentence. They were both sophomores (read: banned from the Prom), which would have been meaningless, if it weren't for the fact that my family was moving to Pennsylvania that summer [which, for those of you geographically- challenged, is VERY far away from Alabama. The down-side of being an Army brat]. I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I'm sure there were tears involved, which any little sister knows is the FASTEST way to a big sister's heart. I talked it over with "him", and we came up with a brilliant idea: "he" would take my sister to the Prom as his date, and I would take my sister's boyfriend as mine. After separate romantic dinners (I still get wistful when I see a Red Lobster), we met up outside of Prom, and "switched" partners. The site of "him" entering the Prom with my sister, raised a few eyebrows (small town), but they signed in and went on through to find a table. When her boyfriend and I waltzed in a few minutes later, everyone knew what was up, and most folks didn't like it. We each danced with our "official dates" for the first dance, then played switch-eroo for the rest of the evening. Chaperones kept periodically coming up to us to ask who our date was, and we've have to stop dancing and point them out across the room. Folks were furious, some schoolmates too, but the four of us had one amazing evening!
(My sister's the gorgeous one in the green dress, with the perfect hair and the "professionally" applied makeup, who was a tomboy that somehow always managed to look picture-perfect. I am the one with the perm-gone-awry-80's-do, AND the gorgeous date!)

Official Prom P.S.
Guess what I just found while looking for my Air Force photo? Junior-Senior Prom (literally, she was a junior, he a senior) the very next year. Recognize the dress?!! Hands-down looks better on little sis, though she did opt for the sensible heels this time. And how can you tell it was still the 80's?! ...more hair than face!