My mind is spinning in all directions today and I just can't quite decide whether I want this to be a blog about a fond recollection, a rant or an apology. So I'm going to go off on all three tangents and try to tie them all together with one string. Just pretend that you're the cap'n and you're trying to piece together the fragments of my random conversations and not say the wrong thing.
Recollection: One Friday night when I was about 11 or 12, my godmother, Lucy, whose house was four doors down from ours (Poor Lucy didn't know when she agreed to stand up at my baptism that I was going to move in the next day, eat up all her ice cream and Hershey's syrup for eighteen years and never go home until my wedding night.) came home from work with a bottle of wine and a new Roger Whittaker album. Her daughter, Lisa, and I rolled our eyes and snorted. Who did she think she was? Some sophisticated jetsetter? (Yes, Whistling Roger Whittaker was considered high-brow for my neighborhood. If you haven't heard of him, you'll have to youtube him. I have few enough readers, I don't want to drive the rest of you off by posting a link.) Lucy, recently divorced, when the word divorce was still whispered or spelled out, had always been our neighborhood's reluctant representative to the now archaic women's lib movement. The first mother on our block to get a job. The first divorcee.
And now she was drinking wine and listening to Roger Whittaker!
Little did we know, as Lisa and I snickered behind our cupped hands, that she was lifting a torch that we would so eagerly snatch up and run with into our womanhood.
(That's Lisa on the left and me on the right. I have no idea who the not-so-perky gal in the middle is, just some drunk that wandered by that we talked into becoming part of a threesome. JUST KIDDING! I don't know any of these women.)
Rant: I'm sure some of you have noticed the brilliant quotation at the top of this page and sighed or exclaimed, "Really? I don't get enough of this shit on my facebook page? Now, I'm being reminded of what an outcast I am on the sober blogs." I hear ya! I'm sick of the virtues of wine being forced down my throat. I'm sick of seeing 50+ year old woman acting like twenty somethings, and calling themselves and their drinking biddies, uh, I mean buddies, by stupid little names like the "Sotted Sluts" or the "Bombed Out Barflies" (okay, I'm being mean, but you get my drift). News alert ladies, you are not in high school anymore, this is not Grease, you are not a Pink Lady, and John Travolta isn't going to jump out of a car, swivel his hips and break into "Sandy." Grow up. Have a little more respect for yourself. (God, I hate how old that makes me sound.) And quit trying to prove to me that your life is so much more exciting and colorful than mine. I remember very well what good wine tastes like when it's hurling itself up from my bowels in techicolor pink and burgundy, thank you very much.
But what pisses me off more than anything else, is that I let these posts make me feel left out and sad.
Apology: To my younger sisters-in-arms in this battle against booze, those in their thirties. I'm sorry, it was the women of my generation who made this mess you find yourself in. See, we didn't grow up in a time when women took bottles of wine to baby showers, an iceberg of lime sherbet floating in a crystal punch bowl full of Hawaiian Punch was about as adventurous as our mothers got. They didn't meet with the gals after work for a couple of shots or have Ladies' Nights Out. They didn't even have bachelorette parties-they believed that at least one party of the wedding celebration should be dignified and sober. That was the womans' role.
It was us, the women that came of drinking age in the late seventies and eighties, that thought we needed to breach one more male stronghold. While our mothers made the first forays into the working world, we made the first forays into the drinking world. Unlike our mothers, we didn't rush home from work to vacuum, put a load of wash in and get supper started. We headed for the bars. Then we came home, vacuumed, put a load of wash in and got supper started. All this before we sat down, blurry-eyed and spent, to go through backpacks and help with homework.
Now we find ourselves, in the midst of our fifties and sixties, looking back and wondering where we lost ourselves. Where the heck did we put our dignity?
My younger sisters, you are so brave for tackling this in this day and age, but you can do it. You've got to do it, for those that are following after you, your daughters.
Just like this blog, we've left a snarled mess behind us, and it's up to you to untangle it.
Stop the madness. Give us back our dignity.
