Claiming My Voice: From the darkness, the light emerges.

If you have been paying attention, you know I was drinking long before my 21st birthday so you’d think that celebrating that birthday wouldn’t have been any big deal. While it wasn’t necessarily a big deal, it was great!

Saturday Night/Southern California: A handful of friends and I (and a bunch of other patrons) stood in line outside Chippendale’s waiting for the doors to open. My friends and I were crossing our fingers. Half of the reason we were crossing our fingers was because it was February and it didn’t matter that it was Southern California: My birthdays were often rained out (the perils of having a birthday in February). The other reason we were crossing our fingers was because technically by birthday wasn’t until tomorrow so we weren’t sure if they were going to let me in to celebrate my 21st. I was optimistic on both fronts!

(For those of you unfamiliar with Chippendale’s, it was a club in So Cal where hot young guys danced and took their clothes off. Sure, there were offshoots with less hot guys but Chippendales had the hottest guys. And yeah, we knew most of them were gay but it didn’t stop us from ogling their very beautiful bodies.)

We were waiting for the doors to open and had about 10 minutes to go when the skies opened up. Within seconds, fifty or so beautifully made up women were drenched..make-up running down our faces, dresses soaked and it didn’t matter that it was the 80s and we all had pounds of hair spray in, all our hair was sagging and messed. In the midst of this, the dancers all came running out with umbrellas to help us the best they could. There was such kindness in them as they passed out the umbrellas to every 8th to 10th woman. The dancer’s quickness and the camaraderie of the women as we bunched together trying to maintain some semblance of decorum still makes me smile. Even after we got inside and the show started, the dancers flirted and danced for us as if we were the most beautiful women they’d ever seen.

With the hubbub of the rainstorm, they weren’t checking ID’s very good and I got in and had my first legal drink! Well, I had my first 5 or 10 legal drinks. Sadly, they were unremarkable…Drinking legally was not as fun as drinking illegally 😉 but, as usual, I digress…

Flash forward about 15 hours: That year my mom outdid herself. She had got us 2 tickets to “Me and My Girl” with Tim Curry (I had developed a huge crush on Tim by this time…mostly due to how endearing he is in Rocky Horror). It was the last day of their national tour, and the actual day of my birthday. Because it was for such an auspicious birthday, my mom had gone all out and we were like 3rd row center! I swear, I could see Tim’s nose hairs! It was the best show ever! And I don’t use that phrase lightly. Tim was having a great time probably because it was the last show. Every once in a while, he’d deliver a line and we could tell the other players would stop in their tracks and you could tell that he’d made up the line…that he was ad libbing. Gosh it was fun. He’d ad lib a line, then the others would have to figure out how to go on from there and the whole while we could tell they were having a blast. Not only was the musical a comedy, but Tim’s comedy ad libs just made it priceless (as I write this I’m grinning from ear to ear – such a great memory – they were just having so much fun and their fun made it so much more fun for the audience).

I don’t know why I suddenly needed to write about this but I remembered it and wanted to share. I’ve had other good birthdays but I think it’s safe to say my 21st was the best…definitely the most memorable.