In the car right now, with cousins Nora, Toby, Page and Charlie. On the way down to Topsail Island, NC. My mother’s family goes to the beach together every year, but this year is special because the Boston cousins are joining us as well, and we are celebrating the would-be centennial of my great-grandmother Rahel’s birth. She’s my namesake (obviously) so I feel like this year might be important for me in some way. I’m oddly attached to all things Grandma Rachel. Anyway, in planning this year’s talent show (the 10th Annual Brish Family Talent Show, thank you very much), I have been moved to look through my showtunes. I had no idea that I was about to accidentally trip down memory lane and smack my face on my pre-sixteen days. I say pre-sixteen because I feel that after my sixteenth birthday, life got a little different. No more hanging out with Tori, a long time without David (which was so depressing I can’t even tell you), Brink had long since drifted away (also depressing), I became absorbed into the world of teenage romance (a la Rob), there was horrible drama in other ways (which I won’t even go INTO), and the next year, my parents moved away and I did not. So really, pre-sixteen was very different than post-sixteen. I was wise to have a huge party to mark the occasion of my bittersweet sixteen
That party was hilarious. I remember there was a small army of soda bottles, an enormous cake with a delicious strawberry filling in the middle and giant polka dots on top, Stephanie taught us some fancy dance moves, Pixie Stix led to much debauchery, “Extreme Horse” in the driveway (involving the hoods of both our dilapidated Explorer and Ricky’s car, a giant shovel, and sometimes carrying Doug around to shoot from a supine position). My brother did that hilarious beat-up-and-insult-Rob thing when we were FINALLY starting to flirt. Then my mom had to, in the midst of my birthday party, explain to Mark why it is physically impossible and generally inadvisable to “suck your momma’s balls!” The photos from that party are some of my favorite ever (thank you, Brianna).
At any rate. Thank you Jonathan Larson and Tick, tick…BOOM! for this little stroll. Those were good times. I didn’t realize that I had already moved so far beyond them. It has gotten to the point that I’d forgotten what my dreams were then. I wanted to write plays, direct them, turn them into screenplays and direct those as well. I wanted to write the lyrics to “songs that people will listen to and remember” (j. Larson) full of send-ups to the 90s music that made us materialistic, the movies that turned us into popcorn addicts, the over-acknowledged emotions that made us Generation X, the violence, the beauty, the hunger, the nonsense, the drama, the therapy, the mountains, the kisses in front of refrigerators covered in to-do lists, the nights we were too chicken to skinny dip in the lake, the ex-boyfriends pissing in the yard because the bathroom is all the way upstairs, the unplanned…oh goodness…toddlers now?...the heart-shaped necklaces, the Ron plays, the Kim dances, grabbing two cheeseburgers each at the drive-thru for five bucks, chicken tender melts after shows and before dances, the leopard-print bedrooms, the piracy, the midnight releases, the Dungeons and Dragons, the Star Trek, the books carried around in plastic bags to keep the covers from getting scratched, reading Beowulf without opening it all the way because he takes such good care of his books, my first pierogi at a varsity football game, crying on the floor of my new bedroom because J.J. got the room with the purple carpet and I had to live in Pennsylvania in all the wrong shades, the awkward fights in the lunchroom, gathering napkins to get away from the drama, the medieval dinner parties dressed as theatre, the first crush that ever killed my appetite, fake British accents to get rid of my first stage fright, Ida Rinegold and Munroe Murgatroyd in love, “I have to ask all new students this”…”well, we’re the only two girls here, I guess we’ll have to be friends”…”I remember you! You should come over after school. Today.”…”I was supposed to tell you I found this on the floor, but it’s from Joe”…”Iwaswonderingifyoumightwanttogooutonadatewithmesometime”…moving to the back of the classroom because I thought you were cute, Lobster, but I don’t remember what we said…Anyway. It would be impossible to say how much I remember of the pre-sixteens. I sometimes suspect that, if I had to, I could remember every moment with all of you. Every moment that counted anyway.
But somewhere in remembering all of the moments that made us what we are, I forgot the dreams that kept me who I was. I forgot to create things. My writing has gone so far downhill it’s not funny. I haven’t written drama in months, and what I did write failed even to entertain me. So here’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that two weeks away from my sooty apartment right by the train tracks, two weeks with people who knew the version of me that isn’t so bittersweet tasting, two weeks of home and family and reconnection, two weeks of being away from buildings and subway noise and laundry in the scary basement…two weeks will have to be enough to bring me back.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed for me?
