Favorite {Photo} Friday--The Dance in The Dalles

Apparently it's "Retro Week" on Facebook, so everyone is posting old photos of themselves. My best friend from high school, Lisa, is here this weekend for a convention and I drove in today to have lunch with her and her mom (who came along since it's a fun convention). So I decided to find an old photo of the two of us, which I'm sure she'll love. If you didn't hear the sarcasm in that, trust me, it's there. :)

The story that goes along with this photo is almost too much to believe. Looking back it seems completely asinine that we even did this, but then again, it was high school; pretty much everything we did in high school was utterly ridiculous! :)

Now, I'll try to keep this as simple as possible, but pay attention, 'kay? So Lisa was friends with a girl named Sarah. Sarah was on the swim team, and in her travels for swim meets she met a boy, whose name I cannot begin to remember, who went to another school about two hours away in a town called The Dalles. Sarah being a teenage girl, of course she liked him even though he lived far away; she probably liked him more because he lived far away, drama being a primary tenet of teenage girlhood. So this boy--let's just call him Brian, to make it easier--asked her to come to a formal dance at his school. Even though he lived two hours away. So she somehow cons her mom into this plan, whereby Sarah will bring Lisa along, and Brian will ask a friend, and it will be a foursome going to the dance. Oh, and Lisa and Sarah would stay overnight at Brian's mom's house, did I mention that part?

At the last minute, Sarah's mom comes to her senses grounds Sarah for something or other, and says she can't go to the dance. And here's where it should have ended, right?

But Lisa and I, being the sweet girls we were, just felt awful for these two boys we'd never even met, suddenly dateless to a big formal dance. I mean, just imagine. Like, how totally, like, embarrassing!!

So we decide that we will come to the rescue, and I will go in Sarah's place. Even though neither Lisa nor I have met either of the boys. Even though it's two hours away in the middle of winter. Even though I don't have a dress and I have to borrow one from our friend Alyson who is much more beautiful and dramatic than me and could actually pull off enormous shoulder poofs.

My mom talks to Brian's mom and is assured that we'll be safe and she won't let Brian sneak into our room in the middle of the night and all that jazz. So, just like that, we pack our bags and our dresses and get ready to drive two hours to go to a dance with some guys we don't even know. Lisa's step-dad John puts the tire chains into the trunk of Lisa's awesome Chevy Cavalier, just in case we need them, and we head out.

When we're almost to The Dalles, we take a wrong exit. And in the process of turning around, someone starts to drive down this enormously huge hill. In the snow. In a Chevy Cavalier. There's a parking lot about halfway down the hill, so I urge her to pull in. But as soon as she turns the wheel, the car slides sideways and the wheels start spinning and we're stuck. So I get out of the car, trying to check out the situation, and Lisa keeps spinning the wheels. And I just start laughing, hysterically. So I'm standing outside in the snow laughing so hard I can barely breathe, and Lisa's inside the car, spinning the wheels and crying and screaming at me, "It's not funny!" This is what friendships are made of, for sure.

The car is at an angle across the road on a hill, so I decide the only thing to do is to drive the rest of the way down the hill so we can get to a flat spot to put on the chains. So we get down the hill, and I ask Lisa how we put on the chains, because John had said that he'd show her.

John only told her. Telling a high school girl something she doesn't want to know and doesn't think she'll need to know is exactly the same as not telling her at all.

But I'm a smart girl, I'm sure I can figure out tire chains, right? In my letterman's jacket and cotton gloves, in the snow?

Let's just say that there was more crying and more laughing by both of us, and NO ONE offered to help us. Eventually I figured it out, with frequent breaks back in the car to warm up my FROZEN hands, and we made it back up the hill. At the top of the hill it turned out that there was a bar, and for some reason a lot of men were sitting outside the bar on benches under an awning. Just as we drove past them, one of the chains came off, so I made Lisa stop the car so I could go back and pick it up. All the men watched me walk back to the chain, pick it up, walk back to the car, put it in the trunk, and get back in the car, while they said not a single word, let alone offering to help. This used to make me really mad, until I realized that they were sitting on benches outside a bar on a Saturday morning in the freezing cold January weather while it snowed; I don't want to say they were mentally deficient, but let's just say that they probably wouldn't have been much help to us anyway!!

Eventually we made it to the correct exit, and met the guys, which was hilarious in its level of awkwardness. We went back to Brian's house and got all gussied up and Brian's mom took our picture!


Then we went to the dance, which was weird and incredibly awkward, because of course everyone at the dance was staring at us like, "Who the heck are they? And where did that blond girl get that ridiculous dress? And why isn't she standing up straight?" Lisa and I kept trading the guys as partners, because Brian's friend (far left) was weird and neither of us wanted to slow dance with him. Eventually we all went back to Brian's mom's house and played this totally fun game called True Colors. Lisa and I looked for it for years afterward and could never find it, but it looks like a re-released version is available on Amazon now! I'm tempted to buy it but of course it wouldn't ever be the same (not to mention that I have a ton of games that we never even play!).

In the end of course I'm glad we went, because this is one of those stories that are such a part of our friendship. But seriously? How nuts!

Happy long weekend!