Getting Drunk With Quakers--A Reflection of 2005

For those of you who are lucky enough to be born on a day far away from New Year’s Eve and its culture of empty promises, you have two opportunities to take the requisite inventory to examine your life and become a better person, New Year’s and your birthday. Well, three if you are Jewish and observe the high-holidays. One cold March night in 1981, my mommy and daddy prayed very hard and there was so much love in the room that the stork suddenly appeared and tapped my mommy’s belly and I was born 9 ½ months later, during the stale week between Christmas and New Year’s. With a birthday so close to New Year’s, I am convinced that the way I celebrate and falsely pontificate on my year’s actions will impact my karma for the upcoming year. Hence, that week turns into one massive introspective self-pity fest, leaving me thinking twice as hard about the life I lead and realize how I spend most of it drunk. My life thus far has been caught in the bitter cycle of alcoholic karma.

If you think about it, that is a pretty irrational thought, how ever I spend my birthday and New Year’s will indicate how I will fare the rest of the year. This is what happens when your childhood birthday parties' invitees are your imaginary friends the Thunder Cats, Transformers, and Rainbow bright and not your childhood friends to distract you from your precocious neurotic pensive behavior. My non-imaginary friends vacationed in exotic destinations such as Orlando Disney, California Disney, visiting the grandparents in Fort Lauderdale, or skiing out West. As I grew up, and went off to college, I saw a repeat of my youth—instead of parents whisking kids away it was the school kicking us out for winter break.

Taking a cue from the feminists I read in my Sexuality and Gender class my first year of college, I appropriated Audre Lorde’s teachings, “Using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house”, and reclaimed my birthday. I was going to make my birthday work for me, while simultaneously wearing a short skirt, cum-fuck-me boots, with a dirty martini in hand. I’ve kept that New Year’s birthday resolution for the last 5 years, always spending my birthday and New Years in an exotic locale or making sure my friends fly up for my birthday, convinced that the energy of my birthday and New Year’s rubs off onto the upcoming year. And every year, the karma does follow the energy of those nights, my years have been spent drunk and making out with the sexually confused.

This past birthday I spent in Sun Valley: getting drunk off Bloody Marys, and Hot Cocoa mixed with peppermint schnapps and Godiva liquor, celeb spotting in the lodge (Larry David!!!), making some amazing runs down the beginner trail, yoga, and of course champagne and caviar. Needless to say my birthday left me with high expectations for the upcoming year.

I wanted New Year’s to continue the trend.

Except this year, the contradictions of my life dictated how I would bring in the New Year. Vomiting so hard over a toilet inside the dorm of a Quaker boarding school because I drank too much Veuve Clicquot.

And yes, this happened to me many a time this past summer, Vueve Clicquot making a widow out of my sobriety and the contents of my stomach, as I performed my rendition of a what a scale-down Niagra Falls would look like if it existed over a commode. I shouldn’t be surprised this is how I rang in the New Year.

Except this time, instead of vomiting and getting rid of the excess alcohol so I’d be left with a clearer head—I ended up drunker after my barfing spree.

So drunk, that I began to walk along the floor where my friend lived and looked at the pictures outside the girls’ rooms--giving my predictions who would end up ugly, who would be gay (of course the dirty hippy), and commenting that the ugly married faculty members living across the hall were perfect for each other because they are both busted. I announced my pity for their future brood, legitimizing ugly offspring because ‘you can’t expect much from a gene pool like that’. After I called the couple ugly and announced my pity for their future unborn children, I began to wonder about the off-chance if their child received the recessive good-looking genes, and their reaction to a good looking child.

“They would shame their child into being ugly!!” I slurred aloud.

Lu interjects into the conversation I am having with myself , “Shannon, how do you shame your child into being ugly?”

Obviously not winning the internal dialogue that became external, I look for my next drunken distraction and find a drunk Quaker rummaging through old theater clothes and wigs. Simultaneously, my friend Katie asks me to pose for a picture with Lu.

“Duuuuddee!! Wait!! I got the perfect costume!!”

I run over next to the drunk Quaker and begin to try on wigs. As I am trying on a blond wig, I see the perfect dress…a size 2 front lace up dress that would perfectly expose my breasts and barely cover my nipples.

I then run into my friends room, filled with such excitement that I don’t close the door behind me and proceed to squeeze myself into this dress.

I think I am making some headway, smooshing my breasts into the fucking garment when I hear a riiippp. Teeeaaarrrr. And I see what the sound left-- a massive hole along the stitch line.

Even fucking hotter. Now I get to expose my hip too! Score!

I bust out of the room, and Katie is in love with the camera loving me. The pictures go from sweet, to goofy, to slightly pornographic, to…well, if my dad found them, he would shoot me and any man who saw them.

20 pictures later, a renewed desire from my childhood to pose naked in Playboy, and there are some hot pics that I think may be worthy of Craigslsit Casual Encounters. Pre-photoshop touch up and lies about height and weight.

But as much as partying with Quakers rocked, the highlight of my New Year’s was the riding around philly in a Porsche Cayenne. Men stopping their cars in the middle of the road trying to get a glimpse of the three women in their mid-20’s inside. The automatic deference that valets paid. The snubbing by the dick doorman at the Four Seasons because Lu wore a Fendi scarf like Tupac with her Burberry scarf draped over her head as I sat in the passenger seat with my Gucci glasses on blocking the imaginary sun on the terribly overcast day. Yea, we looked like assholes. Complete with our desire to tell the doorman that “it’s imperative that you do not let anyone see the person inside this vehicle”. But even decorum got the best of us with that desire.

This year, using my birthday and New Year’s as a barometer for the year ahead, I resolve that my life will be filled with even more indulgence such as a burgeoning champagne and caviar habit. My year will be filled with awesome friends getting each other into asinine trouble, Porsche included; adventures in and out of NYC; drunken debauchery to appease Baccus; and a revaluation of what makes me happy--money, money, money (it enables the lifestyle I have so become accustomed to).

But what is to happen when I come to realize that my misery caused by stagnation isn’t worth it?