Champagne Wishes and Smalltown Dreams

If you've strayed over to this blog periodically, you might know that I love, love, love champagne. LOVE. IT. Now, this is not your passing romance with a beverage. It ranks up there with Diet Coke and dirty martinis. However, it is a wonder that I ever developed such a love for the bubbly considering my first experience with it. Let's go back in time, shall we? Back to a time where the innocent were still innocent....

It's the late '80s, and I had pictures of U2 up in my locker. I wanted to be Madonna. I felt she and I were kindred spirits. Picture a small, country-type, BFE town  in the bible belt and a young, fresh-faced, curly-haired,  high school Sassy. A blonde with a yearning for greener pastures than Podunk, USA. In the small town where I went to high school, the big event was to go out to someone's daddy's pasture with a keg in the back of a pickup truck and drink beer and smoke for 4 hours...or cow tippin'. But not me, I had bigger dreams! 

Sassy had a best friend in high school named Kathy. (We're not friends now, so I can use her name) The Kathy-Sassy mix always tended to lead to some kind of incident that neither one of us would tell our parental units. Oddly enough, they never suspected that we were doing anything untoward. Huh. Anywho, when we were 17, Kathy worked at this pizza place with all of these older guys that we thought were just oh-so-dangerous. They often invited us to party with them after hours, and we thought we were the shit. Now please understand that we were very naive compared to them. I didn't even have a drink until I was 15, and even then it wasn't something I did regularly. One night (was it New Year's? I forget) we went to a house party with a couple of the guys (ok, it was a date but at 17, a guy that was 23 was way over my head). At the house, there was any assortment of liquor, beer, wine.... and then they brought out the bubbly. The chick that owned the house thought it would be a fucking great idea to serve champagne and strawberries to minors who weren't, shall we say, experienced with drinking much of anything. After the first glass, I thought to myself, "Self, this shit is fucking fantastic! Get that guy to pour another!" About 4 glasses in, I decided that I would sample the strawberries, and besides, the idiot cradle robber I was with was more than happy to push more liquor on me. Piece of shit high school dropout pizza delivery boy...oh yeah, SEXY.   But I digress. So after about the 6th glass, I lost count of how much champagne (and yes, it was rather inexpensive at that) I actually imbibed, and I'm pretty sure I had strawberry seeds in my teeth. (And hey, the bubbly-strawberry union really tasted fanfuckingtastic!) Plus, the fuckwad I came with was practically giving me a tongue bath that he mistakenly called "kissing". 

Note: Fellas, you really need to control your spittle and tongue. There's a right way to kiss, and then there's what I refer to as the leaky spigot. Eww. Just ewwww. 

So around about 1:30 am, I'm completely loaded and want to go home. Guess what? That's right! The "gentleman" told me, "Hey babe, you can sleep with me. I won't touch you. Hehehe" Yeah. Right on, shitbag. Not wanting to be the next statistic that would ultimately become a Lifetime "Moment of Truth" movie on date rape, I went in search of my "best friend" Kathy. I found her in short order...having sex with the other guy we came with. (Did I fail to mention that Kathy was a bit of slut? No?) Since she obviously wasn't going to be getting a ride home, I called up a friend who graciously came to get me and drop me at home. (Her mom was our lesbian pharmacist in town.) Now at this time, my sister and I shared a room because my loser pothead brother got a room to himself. My father was away working a lot, so we pretty much took care of ourselves. Anywho, I got home and managed to get myself (somehow) into some pajamas and decided to call my friend Steph (we're still friends, but I have several friends named Stephanie, so no one will be able to really know which one I'm talking about) for a play by play of my evening with the shitbag. I started babbling away about my night, and my poor baby sister, Derk, was trying unsuccessfully to go back to sleep. Then it happened. I got this terrible stabbing pain in my gut, and I said, "Uh, Steph, hold on a minute!" and then I leaned over the far side of my bed and promptly threw up all over the carpet. Projectile-style. Strawberries and champagne, my friends. I don't even know if the pinkish tinge ever really came out of that spot on the carpet. Derk jumped out of bed and started freaking out (she's a freaker outer type), and so I got up and ran to the barfroom, uh bathroom, to finish what I had so casually started. Now I don't remember much after lying on the floor next to the toilet once my dry heaves had passed. The next day, however, the evening's events flooded back to me along with the absolute worst hangover I have ever had to this day in my life. Derk was kind enough to bring me some water, but there was a funny smell in the air in our bedroom. No dumbass, not vomit smell. Gross. It was a clean smell. Turns out, my 11 yr. old sister went the extra mile and CLEANED UP MY VOMIT. Yes, we're THAT close. She was worried (and apparently I had indicated my own worry that night...for quite a long stretch) that I would get an ass whoopin' deluxe from dear ole Dad if he found out. Especially since I was supposed to be home with Derk. 

So, apart from the 3-day hangover, the projectile vomiting, the tongue bath from a fuckwad, Derk freaking out, and the pink tinge to a 3 x 3 area of the carpet on the far side of my bed, it was quite an entertaining evening. It would be quite a few years before I even thought about trying champagne again. But alas, change was inevitable in smalltown Podunk. Steph graduated (she was a year ahead), Kathy dropped out and ended up a couple of years later having to dry out and detox in a "center", and I eventually went on to college and moved out. Derk, however, never let me forget that night. But that's okay....she cleaned up my vomit. Of course, she got me back by coming out to stay with me for a few weeks when I was in college and having sex with her skanky boyfriend on my livingroom floor. I'd say we're even...

*Seriously, Derk! Did you think I didn't know?? XOXO

**Kathy is now happily married with two kids and lives in the same area where we went to high school. WTF? The bitch goes to rehab and still comes out ahead?? God is giving me the finger!