Old Friends & Cherry Pie...

NOT THIS CHERRY PIE...

THIS 'CHERRY PIE'...

(This picture was borrowed, for the sake of this non-profit post from Cherry Pie's official website www.cherrypie.org)

So, about a month ago, I get this e-mail (said e-mail has been altered to make it fit here, and to remove actual names. Plus it was in some gigantic font that even I didn't recognize and wasn't very cooperative with the blogger)...

Help the freak celebrate the big 30! Saturday February 25th at Bub’s Irish Pub in Germantown. OTTO will ring in a new milestone in his life in STYLE! My favorite local band “CHERRY PIE” will be playing so DON’T miss it! CANCEL your plans, HIRE a babysitter, SELL your tickets, CHANGE your dinner reservations, MORTGAGE your house, or SELL your plasma if you have to! DON’T miss this. I want an event for the ages! The story of this night will be told for generations. Be a part of HISTORY! We’re gonna party like it’s 1989. Come dressed in your best 80’s attire (you won’t feel out of place). Tell your friends, tell your family, and tell your friends’ family. It’s a public setting so anyone may attend. This is not an invitation; merely information. Bub’s Irish Pub is located on Main St. in Germantown. Directions can be found on Mapquest. No RSVP required and NO GIFTS!! Just show up and have FUN! The show is scheduled to start at 9:30, but you may want to show up semi-early (the parking isn’t great). It will be fun!

The actual e-mail was sent by hubby's best friend, Otto (not his real name...but it fits...you figure that one out!) in regards to his 30th birthday celebration.

Now, hubby and Otto have been friends since like...birth. It's the strangest friendship ever and it's completey surprising to me that it even still is...not that they fight or anything. They're just really in different places in their lives now...but they're still holding on...nothing, not even me, can separate these two yahoos.

[Some backstory...I met hubby, Otto, Carl, Chris, Jeff, Kev, Keith (prev. 3 are actually relatives of mine who I didn't know or meet until just before high school and the latter two are twins), Lee, Steve, Paul and Tim...a close group of friends. Some I met right before I started high school and the rest was shortly into the first month of high school because I already knew the others. They were a tight knit group and I got sucked in, one of only two girls (other than Chris' older sister, Jen) allowed to infiltrate the system and be equal...and I am now the only original girl left in this pack (other than Jen) having survived a lot with them over the last 13 years. In this time, there have been feuds, marriages, divorces...people retiring to their nuetral corners for years at a time since the high school days...we're not a tight group anymore. I think Carl, Tim (I do still see him from time to time though), and Lee have been completely outted from the group, Paul moved to Scotland his junior year of high school (I was a Sophomore then) most of the former boys now have children (few have just child). Everyon'es a grown-up now and sometimes sticking together is a little harder than anyone ever thought it would be. Obviously, I see Otto...he is hubby's best friend...and he's easier to take now that I've finally gotten him to get rid of the mullet...of course he does wear make-up and leather pants quite often now). But literally, the others I haven't seen in years...since the last Cherry Pie outting, and that was just a few of them and that night did not really end well...and rest I've seen at like Walmart...four years ago!]

Good Ol' Otto was really askin' a lot...especially since we are a really dysfunctional group now that we're all older...like I said, not so tight-knit anymore...So, here's how this went...

Hubby and I spent very nearly all last week not together and not speaking to each other. Don't be alarmed, we do this a lot. We fight for weeks at a time and nothing ever really gets resolved...it's more like it just fades out until it's time for the next brawl. This is how we function. It's well known. We are an explosive couple, and both of us are really stubborn with really bad tempers.

Friday was pretty much the culmination of this latest battle royal. We were both drunk. It wasn't good, but like I said, it ended like it generally does and we're ok for now...And then it was Saturday, Otto's 30th birthday, the day of 'Cherry Pie'...

I got up...way too early it being a Saturday and all and so did hubby, both with hangover remnants (I had a headache and was tired and hubby had a sour stomach since he usually mixes liquor with stupid shit like jalepenos. I threw on a hoodie and some jeans, which were too big due to the gigantic weight loss (no, I have not managed to put any of the weight back on which means I'm generally just freezing my ass off). I figured since I have sort of a love/hate relationship with Otto and have been harassing him about his love for 'Cherry Pie' for a couple years now, I could just wear that to the show and save myself the time and trouble of finding something else to wear.

We had some bullshit errands to run like get the truck washed and the oil changed and take some paperwork to the tax woman...

Tax Woman Story...which makes me a total asshole: The woman that does our taxes is hubby's friend Bear's mother-in-law. She is a perfectly wonderful lady, probably in her late fifites, early sixties and last year when I saw her for the tax fiasco, she had a mullet. Not only that, but she also lives in a trailer. I have nothing against people who live in trailers...although, I do have plenty of mullet issues. Anyway, hubby recently took her most of the paperwork she needed for the taxes and while they were talking, she told him that she had cancer and was going through chemo. This sucks. So, Saturday, when we went out there to take her some more paperwork she ended up needing, hubby went in and came back out and said she now had a wig on. The first thing out of my mouth (here's the part that make me an asshole...drum roll please...)..."Is it a mullet wig?". It's not funny. I know that, and so does hubby, but we both cracked up laughing. Of course, later I was talking to BEG about the tax lady and basically she said the same thing, so I don't feel so bad about it anymore.

Somewhere, in the midst of errands, I started to feel better and decided that I probably should buy something new to wear to 'Cherry Pie'. I mentioned the words 'BLACK' and 'Slinky' and hubby's eyes went all googley and we set off for the mall. At the mall, it was 'live model' day which is the most hilarious shit ever. There were many, young girls in windows taking a lot of harassment. There was a lot of laughter and a big guy just screwing with the girls in the window at DEB...I should probably mention that of all the live models in the mall, DEB had the less than good ones...you know, the ones that aren't really cut out for modeling.

Anyway, with hubby and not a girlfriend helping me pick out something to wear, you can pretty much guess what kind of smutty attire I ended up with and just how little of it there actually was...

Toxic Jeans: They're awesome. They fit well and they're super comfy. Buy lots!!! They come with their own sand paper....

Anyway, so I was a little skanky and definitely far away from my usual jeans&hoodie combo. We live like an hour away from the bar where 'Cherry Pie' was playing so we ate dinner and piled into the truck at like 8pm, on our way into the unknown...sometimes these group outtings end well and sometimes they don't...

Seeing as how we were both still tired and not feeling so great and haven't really hung out with many of the people we expected to see there in like years as mentioned previously, we formulated a plan. Neither of us were going to drink excessively...I wasn't going to drink at all (it's not really my thing anyway) and we were going to leave around midnight for home...this is not exactly how it went...

It was like exactly 9pm when we got there and then it took like a millenia to locate a place to park the huge truck which makes parking problematic on it's own on a normal day. Otto wasn't lying when he said the parking was sucky. We ended up on a side street like five blocks away. Apparently all Germantown has to offer on a weekend is a strip of bars and little or no place to park. Maybe they're trying to force people into car-pooling or the designated driver thing. Whatever!

We paid the cover charge, got inside and started hunting for familiar faces, first finding Jen (Chris' older sister) and Rachel (Chris' wife of about six months whom I hadn't ever met since theirs was a wedding I decided to skip for reasons I won't be sharing here. I will say though that no one should just settle). They were all decked out in their eighties gear, which included LA Gear and they both closely resembled Debbie Gibson, poofy bangs and all.

Then I saw Steve, who used to be my 'adopted twin brother' and whom was the last of the folks that have been seen in passing at Walmart. After that and some liquor, more had arrived (the group has newbies and is quite a lot larger now) and we all started falling back into the old swing of things. It basically turned out like none of us had ever been apart and especially not as long as we all had been. Otto was definitely having a good 30th birthday.

I was pretty happy, having always been the youngest of this bunch, to find that I am no longer the baby in the group. Someone else is much younger and it was sort of not-so legal for him to have even been in the bar...but that's all I'm sayin' about that. He wasn't drinking so I don't know that it was a terrible thing he was there.

Jen and I pretty much camped out with Otto on the dance floor, asses shaking, singing and screaming at the top of our lungs to 'Cherry Pie' waxing Poison, Warrant and other hairbands of late...not that we were the only ones...'Cherry Pie' has a pretty big following. And to everyone's complete surprise, their was only one instance of a breast escaping from my practically non-existant shirt and that really only ended in my flashing Jenna (a new edition to our group, currently cheating on her boyfriend part of the group with another member of the group-Oh, the drama!).

I gave a little speech/toast for Otto on his 30th, which basically was something to the effect of, "I stopped fondling my mouse and keyboard...put on practically nothing and came out to call you and dirty, old man..." Of course this was then followed by Jen (She is the eldest in the group, already well-passed thirty) giving hubby a lecture about letting me out of the house dressed like I was. She was drinking quite heavily as we all resorted to this sort of behavior, so it didn't take her too long to get over it and rock on!

'Cherry Pie' was awesome! They have greatly improved since the last time I saw them and have since replaced their drummer. All in all it was great, old school fun with old school friends! There was only one instance of one of us getting in another of us's face for being a dick (not sayin' who) and after a while and some more liquor, it really didn't matter that so-and-so had resorted to his evil, back-stabbing bullshit ways! So-and-so is such a girl (but really a man).

It was also the first time I had ever seen the men desert the men's bathroom and get in line with the ladies. I can only imagine what kind of tragic disaster took place in the men's to get them to flee and wait in a line that just continued to grow longer and longer as the night went on. It was nearly impossible to pee...but then on the flipside, it was also really busy and nearly impossible to get a drink at the bar (hubby went on many solo missions to bar from which he took a long time to return).

The original plan having been totally blown all to hell and all of us either mostly drunk or unable to walk a straight line, hubby, me and Jen hopped in the truck, freezing our asses off and abandoning Jen's car, and we drove her home, where she promptly vomitted in the kitchen sink. Poor girl! Hubby and I then booked back to Racine and to the Taco Bell, getting in the longest line I've ever seen at a Taco Bell. Got home, chowed and crashed out.

Yesterday, hubby laid on the couch like a veal for most of the day, watching the Nascar race...mostly because he had spent Saturday night head-banging and what not and couldn't hold his head up too good. I was without hangover, but was still pretty tired. We did go out to fetch some stuff and hubby bought me this...

...returning me back to my geek-girlness, safely returning me to my sci-fi love and my pc, like I had been some kind of trampy Cinderella the night before.

All in all it was pretty fun. My throat was sore, I smoked too much and I had a funny pain in my heel from the heel of the boot I wore to the show. Apparently I stepped too hard on it at some point in the night 'cause all day yesterday I could feel it like I still had the boot on. I got back in touch with a lot of folks I hadn't seen in quite a while and got to relive some younger day silliness. I also got to remember why we were all friends in the first place.

Plus I got to wear my leopard print, pimp coat!