Fun Game for Drunks: You at Fifteen

So like a year ago, my friends and I were volunteering at a bigass charity event, and one of the other volunteers was this really awesome girl, K. We knew she was younger than us — we’re all 28 – 40 — but we didn’t realize how much younger until we were all bitching about having to go to work tomorrow after all these cocktails (Grey Goose was a sponsor of the event and we are wily with appropriating our own perks), and she said something about having to go to school tomorrow. So one of the guys goes, “Oh, you’re still in school? Where?” (Meaning, of course, which college in the area). She’s like, “[Whatever] High School.” And we all just about fell out of our shoes — she laughed at us and told us she was fifteen.

Whoa.

I know damn well that though I thought of myself as quite Mature for My Age at 15, Practically An Adult, GOD!, I had nowhere near the poise and social grace of this girl, nor her sweetness and sense of humor, nor her unstudiedly cute hair and subtle makeup — I was a spaz, man.

So I spent the next couple of hours drunkenly demanding to know what each of my friends were like at fifteen (these are all California émigrés, people who met when we were 21-plus, so we never saw each other’s Truly Unfortunate Years). There’d be a lull in conversation and I’d pick a new victim, jab a finger at them, and bray, “YOU AT FIFTEEN — GO!!”

“I was a jock — real skinny though — my head was bigger than my shoulders …"

“I lived on a mountain. We didn’t even have basic cable, so I was reeeal hip at school.”

“That was before I got tall …"

And as for me, young Gleemonex? You don’t need to know all the details, Internets … suffice to say, I was quite the overachieving A-plus student, I had seen Major League six times in the theater, my jeans were as high-waisted as anyone else’s (which, in 1989, was hiiigh), and there may or may not have been a perm involved. A spiral perm.

And now -- now you know too much …