Oh Honestly, Erin

Alternately titled: Tune-Triggered Thoughts

Hasn’t been there in the longest time

The other day, Billy Joel’s “Longest Time” was playing on the radio in my bedroom and it reminded me of this time when I was in high school. I can’t remember who was looking for what in the kitchen, but all I said was simply, “That hasn’t been there in the longest time.”

My dad LOST HIS MIND over this. To this day, I still don’t understand why it was funny (probably like how no one understands my MAN WHO CROSSED THE STREET story) but he mocked me endlessly, repeated, “It hasn’t been there in the longest time,” in this hideous Valley Girl accent that I 100% DID NOT HAVE.

He would bust out with this slogan for years, at any given moment, similar to how he thought it was hilarious that my fifth grade class sang a song about our elementary school on graduation night, to the tune of Cameo’s Word Up, and he would walk around saying, “Gill Hall, yeah, Gill Hall” and just fucking lose his mind in laughter. I mean, just a few years ago, he was telling me about how he got a part-time at Gill Hall, and then he interrupted himself to rap/sing, “YEAH, GILL HALL.”

And this is why I think it’s so interesting that, even though he is not my bio dad, I am SO MUCH LIKE HIM IT’S WEIRD. Especially considering we didn’t even get along for more than half of my childhood.

Fuck the Locomotion

While making breakfast one day recently, I was listening to an 80s dance hits playlist on Spotify because, you know, when in the 80s kitchen…

Yadda yadda.

Everything was going great but then Kylie Minogue’s cover of the Locomotion came on and I was suddenly swaddled in a rage Snuggie. I hadn’t heard this song in quite some time, and the first thing it did was send me flying back to the late 80s, the finished basement of Elisabeth….we’ll call her BOLTZ. Back then, Elisabeth (never Beth, never Liz, never BETTY god forbid) and I were pretty good friends. I used to go to her house sometimes on weekends  to do crafts or whatever, maybe it was only one time actually, because the only memory I have of that was making beaded bracelets while watching Labyrinth for the very first time. Now that I think about it, I remember not liking her house because her dad was such a creep. His name was Donald (my dad called him The Donald, a la Trump, because he acted super high and mighty just because he was in charge of his father-in-law’s plumbing company, AND he used to talk in a Donald Duck voice at  my younger brother’s soccer games to make the kids like him I guess, who the fuck knows. Even back then I knew he was super lame.

Where was I…oh, in The Donald’s basement. This actually has nothing to do with him, so if you’re waiting for me to suddenly un-repress some gross lecherous memory about The Donald showing me his “plunger” in the basement, well….wrong blog but maybe I’ll write a flash fiction about that someday!?!? The real memory I had was being in Elisabeth Boltz’s basement for her birthday sleepover. I can’t remember if she was giving CASSINGLES away as prizes, or if everyone received one as a party favor, just that I was PISSED because I wanted Electric Youth and I wound up with the fucking LOCOMOTION instead. I mean,  it’s not like I couldn’t have just gone to fucking Waves or National Record Mart with MOMMY WARBUCKS and just buy the whole damn tape, cassingle be damned, but it was the whole point that I wanted ELECTRIC YOUTH right then and there, call me Veruca, I don’t care.

So now I’m standing in the kitchen, burning my eggs, fuming at this memory, even more pissed because I’m screaming ECHO, CHANGE THE FUCKING SONG, NEXT SONG YOU DUMB CUNT and it’s still just Kylie braying on and on about this brand new dance and now I’m thinking about Miss-Never-Bess Boltz and how in high school she was uber preppy and dating some star senior football player when we were still underclassmen, and she would roll up to school in some too-nice car looking like a goddamn equestrian and we never had a falling out or anything, but we definitely went different directions (my family was still way richer than hers but who’s laughing now, definitely not me HAHAHAHA ughhhh). I honestly don’t think we ever really talked in high school and it always drove me crazy that people thought she was so RITZY AND CLASSY when she had a perpetual sinus infection and would sniffle SO WETLY all of the time and her face always had that dripping faucet sag to it.

I have a spotty recollection of this part but Janna corroborated parts of it so I think this really happened, but at some point during senior year, one of our mutual friends approached me and started asking me questions about my vegetarian diet. The HARD QUESTIONS like: “what kind of supplements do you take” and other such bullshit. And I’m like, “Bitch do I look like I take supplements, I live off of cheese sandwiches for god’s sake” and it turns out they were asking me this because ELISABETH-IN-THE-RIDING-STIRRUPS over there had been looking uber pale and sickly as of late and claimed it was because she had “become a vegetarian” and her friends were calling bullshit on  this and it turns out they were right to question her new lifestyle because it turns out she wasn’t just not eating meat anymore, she wasn’t eating anything AT ALL.

I don’t know how that ever panned out, if all the PREPS had an intervention at the country club or whatever, but I guess she didn’t die because several years  post-high school, Chooch’s estranged godfather was living in some moderately high-class apartment building downtown and one day he saw her in the lobby of his building because of course she would happen to live there.

“SHE LOOKED ELEGANT AS EVER,” he gushed to me, and I was like, “OH COME THE FUCK ON, MISS SNIFFLES MCGEE OVER THERE?” I don’t care how elegant her clothes were, she was probably dripping snot all over them.

Well, now Present Day Erin is REALLY thinking long and hard about this girl so I had to look her up on the Internet because this is how modern people live their lives now. We put on a Netflix series that we’re barely paying attention on fall down “preppy anorexic fake equestrian” rabbit holes. I couldn’t find anything on her based on her maiden name, so I really did a deep-dive into The Donald and on his dumb plumbing website, I saw a mention of his SON-IN-LAW so now I had her married name and OF COURSE she’s a lawyer now but the best thing ever is that she looks like Hillary Clinton from the mid-90s in her professional headshot and that’s not a dig on 1990s Hillary Clinton, but a dig on the fashion and hair choices of someone who people called CLASSY and ELEGANT back in the day.

And she still has that sneezy look to her, too.

Anyway, thanks Kylie Minogue.

(Honestly I don’t even have anything against this person, not even in high school. We were far from nemeses – we just weren’t really anything to each other at all. Of course, when I told my mom about my findings, she was like, “What was her mom’s name, she was a bitch” LOL.)

These are some things that happened way back in Baby Face Erin’s life that I still think about occasionally like wow what an impact, who knew.

The Acting Class

In the winter of 7th grade, my friend Liz convinced me to take some kind of acting class with her at the Pittsburgh Play House. I can’t for the life of me imagine why I would have said yes, if my mom forced me to do it or if Liz just made that compelling of a case for it. Because I have never in my life been interested in acting, not even when I was super little and my grandparents used to say I should be in soap operas because of the way I could turn on the tears (and it’s true even in present day that I am a master class in drama but ONLY ON MY TERMS, THANK YOU).

OK so now I’m taking these classes with Liz, I think they are on Saturday afternoons or maybe mornings, and the class is small and cold. I vaguely remember us being the younger people in the class and failing miserably when we had to pair up and shadow each other with our eyes closed. There were legit strangers in the class who succeeded in this exercise better than Liz and me who were, at the time, best friends and spent a ton of time together. Well, we definitely could not feel each others QUOTE UNQUOTE ENERGY, that’s for sure.

But the whole reason I’m telling you this now is that there is ONE INCIDENT involving ONE PERSON that flashes through my mind every now and then and I wonder now if it actually seared a bit of trauma into my brain. Anyway, here is what happened. There was one guy in the class who at the time seemed so old, like he could have been in his 20s, but now that I’m thinking about it I bet he was only around 17 or 18. One of our assignments was that we all had to make up a skit (and no I have no recollection of what my skit was, I either blacked it out or quit going before it was my turn to perform, either option seems very On Brand). The skit that the guy acted out for us involved a poker game that got super heated, explicit, and VIOLENT. I remember VIVIDLY that he was was swearing loudly, kicking over chairs, maybe he even flipped over the table?! I just know that I was TERRIFIED because it didn’t seem like he was acting at all, but it seemed like he was actually projecting some REAL LIFE aggressions onto us and I knew at that moment that:

• this class was not for me
• I never wanted to play poker

I also vaguely remember the acting teacher stepping in and gently putting a moratorium on the skit.

The reason I was thinking about this recently was because we were in the car a few weeks ago going to Buffalo and, coincidentally, Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” came on and I always associate her with this time in my life because that same year she had released a new album that I used to play on repeat because IT WAS SO GOOD and I started playing some of the songs off it for Henry that day and he was like, “No, I really promise you that none of these songs sound familiar to me at all” probably because this was when he was in his COUNTRY PHASE and playing VOLLEYBALL with the GUYS AFTER WORK while I was in MIDDLE SCHOOL.

Anyway, my favorite song from that album was MOVE WITH ME.

This inspired me to message Liz on Instagram and ask her:

• if she remembers this
• did this even really happen

And she confirmed that yes, she too remembers it. We also reminisced about the time her mom took us to eat at the Elephant Bar after one of the classes, which honestly was worth the torture of those classes because that restaurant was the best place we had in our little area of the South Hills and I’m actually surprised no one rioted the day it closed. THE CEILING FANS WERE MADE TO LOOK LIKE ELEPHANT EARS, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! THEY HAD THE BEST PEANUT BUTTER PIE! IT WAS LIKE EATING ON THE GOLDEN GIRLS’ LANAI!!

When the Elephant Bar closed, by dad went and stole the big metal ELEPHANT BAR PARKING sign and gave it to me. It was in my kitchen forever and now it’s in the garage. I’m hoping someday when/if I ever buy a house, to have a good spot to hang it. It’s huge!

Do You Even Know How To Answering Machine?

You know how when something humiliating happens to you, that’s always the memory that stays the most VIVID, like fucking TECHNICOLOR VISION, in your goddamn memory pouch? Never mind all those blissful, happy moments that you want to sew into your hippocampus like a serial killer patching up his lampshade with victim skin. This isn’t the MOST HUMILIATING thing that has happened to me by a longshot but it was one of the first ones that really made a lasting impression on me and I think about it A LOT, more than a normal human ever should, because I am just pathetic:

I was in elementary school, maybe in 2nd grade? 3rd? And I was calling my BEST FRIEND CHRISTY who never made me take an acting class, and for the first time ever, I was met with the fuzzy SORRY WE MISSED YOU greeting of an ANSWERING MACHINE. At the sound of the beep, PANIC SET IT. I had no idea what to do! So I hung up! Then I called back, prepared this time for the BEEP, and ready to say “HI CHRISTY IT’S ERIN CALL ME BACK” but instead I started talking before the beep!!! The THIRD TIME, I think I might have said “Hi Erin” instead of Christy, and then made some sort of painful, strangulated cry and hung up again. I so vividly remember doing this AD NAUSEUM because I wasn’t comprehending that my fuck-ups were STILL BEING RECORDED AND SAVED even though I wasn’t saying, “OK BYE” at the end. Like hello CHILD ERIN, answering machines can’t intuit when to step in and erase someone’s ERRONEOUS RAMBLINGS. Otherwise, we never would have gotten that classic FRIENDS episode where Monica leaves a message on Richard’s answering machine!

YOU KNOW!?!!

Yeah, so I left probably between 5-10 messages where I cut  myself off with frustrated exhales and screams and no one ever mentioned it to me but I bet her parents or older brother listened to them all and snickered before telling her to call her neurotic friend back and maybe consider writing her a script to use next time she calls.

I still panic to this day when I have to leave a message for someone, especially at work, thanks CHRISTY’S ANSWERING MACHINE.

In case you were wondering, my face was flushed and I was so disgusted with myself while writing this DUMB STUPID IDIOT MEMORY UGHHHHH BEEP.