i wish that i could (be like the cool kids)

Y'all wanna hear a story?

This is a wee different kind of post, but it's what I feel like writing today, so here goes:

All through school, I had this best friend, Kim Brewer, and she and I did everything together. Sleepovers. Play dates. Birthday parties. I even once ran away to her house, but that's a whole other story for another post.

Our story today, though, takes us all the way back to middle school, or in MY day, we called it junior high. Kim and I were finishing up 9th grade, excited and nervous that we were moving up to the high school come fall, and wondering what cool stuff we could get into over summer vacation.

One day, on one of the last days of the school year, a poster in the cafeteria caught our eye. TALENT SHOW.

Oooh.

What an AMAZING way to make a splash into high school AND introduce ourselves to the cool kids, we thought. Surely, if we are in the talent show, in front of well, EVERYBODY, we could stand out and make a name for ourselves, maybe even be, dare we dream, popular? ALL the cool kids are in the talent show, right?

I can't even TYPE this without flinching. Why were we so dumb? I can only blame it on hormones raging and being young and stupid and maybe a little of the I-just-got-my-braces-off glee that was pulsing through both of us.

I wish I could tell you that we woke up from this delusion, that we decided NOT to do the talent show, or at the very least, that we chose as our act something, anything that wouldn't TOTALLY embarrass us, but this is not that kind of story.

This is the kind of story that makes you cringe, that makes you wanna shout at the characters involved NO, DON'T DO IT, that makes you wonder how we ever even recovered from such a ridiculously feeble attempt at entertainment without years of therapy afterwards, with the only comforting thought being that we didn't yet have the internet.

THANK GOODNESS.

Summer finally came. School was out. Kim and I had a little over 2 months to come up with our act and perfect it. What should our act be? We could sing? Nah. We could dance? Uh-huh.

Then, in a moment of inspiration while watching Laverne and Shirley, it hit us. (Now I don't know if you watched Laverne and Shirley back in the day like we did, or if you're even old enough to remember, but Laverne and Shirley were role models to us...feisty, independent women working at a beer bottling plant? YES, QUEENS.) And one day, this fateful day, this iconic episode, our two sheroes were talked into GUESS WHAT! A TALENT SHOW!

Their talent? Roller skating.

OMG! WE CAN TOTALLY DO THAT!

And so it began:

First, we had to memorize their moves. (And this was SUPER DIFFICULT in the pre-youtube era! We had to constantly catch re-runs of said episode, make notes feverishly as there was no pause button on the remote. Hell, there wasn't even a remote back then! How did we EVEN survive?)

Next, we had to learn the song. Aba Dabba Honeymoon.

(Here it is on Spotify, if you'd like to follow along. Trust me, it's worth it!)

https://open.spotify.com/track/6stLnIm84oaY2tKgWyxUr8?si=f4eaee72c85642a9

"Aba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba said the chimpie to the monk.

Aba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba said the monkey to the chimp.

All night long they would chatter away, all day long they were happy and gay.

Singin' and swingin' in the honky tonky way..."

I can still sing this song from memory. I think it's ingrained into my brain. Lucky me.

(And now, lucky you! Don't you feel lucky?)

Then, OF COURSE, we had to make monkey costumes. Our mamas helped us (when they should have advised against it). I guess they were thrilled to see us singing and skating to a song from THEIR era, we just thought Laverne and Shirley made it up!.

We had these little skating skirts, black leotards, ears and tails. SO ADORBS!

I know, it's totally giving Thelma and Louise driving that car and you KNOW they're going over that cliff and you don't want them to but you still watch kind of vibes. Harvey Keitel running after them in a futile effort to stop them, but he...just...can't...catch...up...

Where the hell was our Harvey Keitel? Heavy sigh. Nothing to stop us.

School started. We got lost in new halls, trying to find our lockers, and bought swim meet tickets from prankster seniors (our school had no pool) and huddled together at lunch, hoping it'd get better. Counting down days till the TALENT SHOW. Oh my heck, can it just get here already?

Practice started, and we felt so different, like we belonged, finally. Like we were part of something epic. We rehearsed at school, and at home. (Our poor neighbors.) And then, the night we'd been waiting for...

In a beautiful twist of fate, none of my Mama's pictures turned out, and I don't have any from Kim so don't ask. But it happened. It was rare, I was there, I remember it all too well.

The lights went down. Time to start. We were in the second half of the show. We watched from backstage singers and dancers and reciters of bad high school poetry and jugglers and one guy who acted out a scene from Hamlet.

We high-fived each other after each next act. NO ONE was roller skating like us. We're gonna take the cake, surely. NO ONE is dressed up like monkeys. Did they NOT see that Laverne and Shirley episode? It was SO FUNNY.

Of course, Laverne and Shirley's skating went off the rails, they were all over the place, and WE would nail the routine. We'd practiced so much. They also had a big gorilla in their act, and try as we might, neither of our brothers would agree to gorilla for us. No worries, we HAD this.

"Then the big baboon, one night in June, he married them and very soon, they went upon their aba dabba honeymoooooon."

We skated our hearts out! We were SO cute. At least our Mamas thought so. If you somehow are familiar with the Aba Dabba song, you know it gets faster and faster, breakneck speed even, but we rolled right along with it.

We hit every note, every trick, even the one where Kim squatted down on her skates and I pulled her under and through my legs and then we both pretend-fell down on our bottoms, arms up, ta-da!

You might already have guessed this ending. We did NOT in any way become cool kids. I mean, like, ever. I'm still not there. I doubt I ever will be.

And Kim, bless her heart, died so young, colon cancer, before she was even 30. I miss her and wish she was here to help me retell this awful adventure, and others we shared. To me, she was the coolest.

What's this story got to do with anything and why am I even blogging about it? Nothing, I guess and maybe because I think these are the moments that really define us. Not the big wins, but the big flops. Not the glory days but the humiliating evenings. Not being cool but being fun, and the friends who will chase that fun with you, who are your ride-or-die, or in my case my roller skate-or-die of embarrassment.

And I think there is power in telling stories like these. Getting to the place where we're so comfortable in our own skin that we can look back and laugh at ourselves. Because gosh darn aba dabba, THAT was funny.

So here's to all the talent show-ers out there, brave enough to take the stage! I wish we could all be like the cool kids, but cie la vie. It is what it is. Some of us are just chimpies and monks. And that's okay too.

Stay sunny, y'all.

Keep shining!

(And Kim, thank you, my dear sweet funny friend, for always being the Laverne to my Shirley.)