Ep 71 Listeners’ Youthful Shenanigans

“I must have been insane. No, just a teenager”: Designed to distract you momentarily from your current worries, this listener-contributed episode shares youthful tales of awkwardness, getting in over our heads, and debauchery our kids and parents would NEVER believe.

The post Ep 71 Listeners’ Youthful Shenanigans appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .

Photo by Jan Kopřiva

“I must have been insane. No, just a teenager”: Designed to distract you momentarily from your current worries, this listener-contributed episode shares youthful tales of awkwardness, getting in over our heads, and debauchery our kids and parents would NEVER believe.

Badminton phenom Rochelle’s blog, The Late Arrival
The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time – order or download Nancy’s new book!

Thank you, Matthew, for suggesting Burning Sensations’ “Belly of the Whale”!

Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 71 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on March 24, 2020. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email [email protected] ***

Ann Imig 00:00

This guy Kevin – I remember his name is Kevin, but we didn’t know each other. Picture him like Anthony Michael Hall. So, he says, “You can sleep at my place.” And I say, “Okay!” And by his place, he means his parents’ place. We’re in high school.

00:17

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy 00:42

This episode of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast is brought to you by for the love of God and everything you hold dear, please stay home and help flatten the curve for COVID-19. I promise you that the whole rest of this episode is purpose-built to momentarily distract you from the situation in which we find ourselves. But you have to promise me that you are taking the stay-at-home orders seriously, even if they haven’t rolled out yet to your city or state. The Bay Area where I live has been on stay-at-home orders for a full week now and you know what? It’s a pain to not be able to go to the movies or restaurants or coffee with friends. But it’s a lot less painful than losing people we love which is really happening and it’s picking up steam here in the Bay Area. To cop a phrase from the talking heads, “This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no fooling around.” Let’s all use our big Gen X energy to stay home and feel unseen and underappreciated. We were made for this moment.

[MUSIC]

Nancy Davis Kho

Hi there and welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. I’m Nancy and I’m so glad you’re listening. I hope every one of you who hears this is feeling okay. Know that you are not alone. And this is not permanent. And you are a resilient person who can rise to the occasion.

I am definitely having some struggles with staying calm too. I’ve got two kids home who are finishing up their college years, including a senior who won’t have the commencement that she has been working so hard toward for four years. And until who knows when, I assume it’s going to happen someday, but that’s hard. And we have an elderly mom who’s in a memory care facility that’s been locked down in New York State and friends and family worried about their livelihood.

It is appropriate to feel scared or disappointed or anxious or whatever you’re feeling right this minute. The trick is we have to take turns, and we have to pull each other back to the surface when we are lucky enough to be the ones in that state of grace that allows us to feel hopeful and calm for a minute. So, take it day by day, moment by moment, reach out to the people around you. And remember that nothing is permanent. Not even that giant wad of swallowed grape flavored Hubba Bubba bubblegum that has been lurking in your intestines since the 1980s.

My goal today was to find a topic as lighthearted and funny as possible for you to apply medicinally to your ears when the news has gotten to be too much.

Initially, I thought that topic was going to be, what’s your favorite OG MTV music video and why? Because I personally could talk about that topic for days. But it went over like a lead balloon, with the exception of one listener who gets a gold star. Here’s what Matthew had to say about his pick: “Burning Sensations was the quintessential band at Madame Wong’s West, my formative 80s WLA music venue. They play on the same bill as X or the Chili Peppers. This video is everything 80s with homages to everyone from The Motels to Michael Jackson.” Matthew, you are a prince among men and your prize is that the song you chose will be the video included in the show notes for today’s episode. This video has everything. There’s a conch shell, there’s lasers, there’s a lead singer in a fedora. There’s a woman in a bikini scaling a rope ladder. Go to www.midlifemixtape.com  for the show notes and hey, while you’re over there, subscribe to Midlife Mixtape. So, Matthew, thank you for bringing Burning Sensations. That’s not what I meant to sound like. But yeah, you know what I mean.

But in the end, the topic that took off was this: youthful shenanigans, misspent youth, the stories of what you got away with (or didn’t) in your youth, the dares you maybe shouldn’t have taken, the decisions made with only part of your adolescent brain, the antics that if your kids or parents only knew. Well, they’re about to find out if they subscribe. Of course, every time someone sent in a story, it reminded me of one of my own. So, I’m sprinkling a few of my shenanigans on there too. If you know what ear buds are, Mom, put them down.

Before we dive in, I want to say: listen all the way to the end of the episode because one of the people who contributed a story is going to win a copy of my new book The Thank-You Project, so listen up to see if it’s you. Also, I know it may be hard to get out to a bookstore right now although lots of indies are getting very creative about how they can ship temporarily, so check out your local beloved indie. Call them and see what they’re doing in that regard and just say hey. And of course, Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million and others are keeping up with the demand for books to fill some of our now empty out.

But another option is that I narrated an audio version of The Thank-You Project. And my publisher Running Press okayed me to share a sample of the book in today’s episode. So, if you listen all the way to the end of today’s stories, you’ll hear it, and you can find out where to download my book. And with that, let’s start the shenanigans.

[MUSIC]

We’re gonna start with Tales of the Awkward, and we could not kick it off better than with this story from Wendi Aarons.

Wendi Aarons 05:30

This isn’t a story from high school because I don’t really remember high school. But right after college, my friend Megan and I went out on the town in Reno one night and ended up at a karaoke bar. We signed up to do a song because everybody did. And right before it was our turn, these four very handsome, well dressed, middle-aged Black men got up on stage and did an astounding version of “My Girl” complete with all of the right singing and the dance moves. And it was just a showstopper and the entire place went nuts and screamed and clapped. There was a standing ovation. It was just insane.

And then the emcee, who looked like Gunnar Nelson for some reason, said, “Put your hands together. That was The Temptations who are performing at Harrah’s Casino across the street all week.” So, I don’t know why they were doing free karaoke, but the entire place is going crazy. And they’re so excited and blah, blah, blah.

So right after that, there’s a small pause and then Gunnar says, “Now put your hands together for Wendi and Megan performing “Islands in the Stream” by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.” So we shuffle up to dead silence, wearing our 90s baby doll dresses and get through a version of “Islands in the Stream” with our very poor singing and with everybody in the whole place completely let down that The Temptations are no longer on stage and these two idiots were. So, there you go. That’s my story about the time in Reno, Nevada, where The Temptations were my opening act.

Nancy 07:21

The thing is, you just know that those two young women in their baby doll dresses and, I assume, their dark lipstick and 90s chokers were feeling themselves right up to the moment that The Temptations grabbed the microphone in front of them. Like, they knew they were going to impress with their rendition of Dolly and Kenny. And let’s take a moment for Kenny Rogers. Love that guy. Ruby don’t take your love to town, one of my favorite songs and very sorry for that news of Kenny’s loss. But anyway, the distance between that level of youthful confidence that Megan and Wendi surely had, and the reality of a silent disappointed karaoke bar is a hard one to bounce back from man.

Speaking of youthful overconfidence, the next one comes in from Erin and she says this one was easy.

“I was in high school at a party I had no business being at. Per usual for high schoolers, my mother was told I’d be spending the night at my friend’s house.” You guys remember this? I’m going to circle back to what Erin’s saying right now. Erin says, “The deal was I’d check in before heading to bed. I called my house. My memory is fuzzy here, but I believe the landline phone was dragged into a closet so I could try to have this conversation in a quieter environment. I told her I was at Carolyn’s and we were watching movies. Mom replied, ‘That’s funny because this new device your father brought home called caller ID is telling me you’re at Mauricio Martinez’s house and I suggest you come home right now!’ Mortified, I walked back into the party and yelled, has anyone heard of this caller ID thing?” Oh my God, Erin. That’s pretty awkward.

This next one is just a straight up funny story from Michelle. Gather round children. “It was the year of our Lord 1900 and four score four. A time when physical education classes required stringent offerings such as the grapevine, square dancing and badminton. In those days, several nets were strewn crosswise and lengthwise across the gymnasium floor. You would partner with a friend, in my case my best friend Amy, her on one side of the net and I on the opposite side. You’d play matches until the bell rang and race each other wildly to the locker room because in those days you had to reapply electric blue mascara and Aqua Net after each class, and physical education was no different.

On one occasion, the bell rang and as was the custom, my friend Amy began running wildly. I, in an attempt to outrun her because electric blue mascara, delicately hopped over one of the ropes that was strewn across the floor linking all the nets together, when suddenly my right big toe caught upon the rope. Time stopped in that moment, children. I thought, ‘I’m going to die right now needing more electric blue mascara.’ Michelle says I flew through the air Superman-style, landed, then slid across the floor. My badminton partner, my supposedly best friend since kindergarten, Amy, stood frozen in time. Seconds later, she lay down on the floor next to me crying, laughing. Laughing so hard in fact, that she got in trouble.

Michelle says, “I collected myself and Amy, still laughing, made it to the locker room with time enough to change, reapply that important mascara and make it to our next class on time. In our seats after the bell and well into the lesson, she leaned over from her desk still laughing to slide over a piece of paper in her hands that were trembling with laughter. I rolled my eyes to see what this present could say. It wasn’t a note but a drawing of a little stick figure crudely sketched on the lined paper with arms stretched high over its head and a huge Y O U scrawled out with an arrow pointed to the stick figure. As if I couldn’t have figured out who the stick figure was.”

That story of awkward teenage shenanigans comes from Michelle Fritsch, who writes a blog called The Late Arrival and I’ll drop a link in the show notes if you want to read more of her writing. I thought that was hilarious. Amy, you’re so mean. I think we would have been friends in high school.

The final tale in this section comes from my friend David. David writes, “Once during my senior year of college, my best friend and I went to an off-campus bar. When we headed back to the fraternity, it was well after midnight. We were pretty amped up.” Okay, I’m going to interpret this for us. I think they were drunk.

“Our small liberal arts college had a quad which was probably 200 yards long and 50 yards wide. It featured lots of greenery and probably 10 outdoor benches lining the sides of the all-weather walkway. At the head of the quad was a water fountain. We thought it would be funny to carry the benches to the water fountain and build a box of benches stacked on top of each other, just as you would see in a bonfire. When all the benches were so placed, it was probably 10 feet tall. I have no memory how we accomplish this engineering feat.” David, I’m gonna guess it’s because you guys were pretty amped up. “Mid-day the following day, my friend and I went to our mailbox in the commons. Surprisingly, we each had a handwritten note from the dean asking that we stop by. Dean Culley was everyone’s friend, but he sometimes had a ‘hard side’.

As requested, we went to his office. He welcomed us in, and we sat down. Dean Culley said ‘Well?’ and then paused. My friend and I asked, ‘How did you know?’ And he said, ‘Know what?’ Which is when we both realized we had just confessed. That was one of the best lessons I learned in college. And a fun night also.”

[MUSIC]

Nancy 12:30

Now we’re going to go on to our next category, which is about the stories where we had that teenage sense of bravado, we maybe got a little bit over our heads, but we lived to tell the tale. So, let’s get started with the Over Our Heads section. And the first story comes from Ann Imig.

Ann Imig 12:46

I was a pretty good girl in high school, but I lived a double life. I was a Jewish musical theater kid with really long dark hair, earnest, kind. And I ran with a wild crowd when I wasn’t with my very strait-laced musical theater friends. My alter ego ran with the blonde bombshell crazy girls, so there was a lot of shenanigans. My parents were never the wiser, mostly. But this one story I have to share with you.

The beginning of the story is after the party had broken up, dispersed running through cornfields, I think, oh, and let me stop and say nobody has to worry about my safety. Even though listening to this story would worry about my safety, you don’t need to, despite all the bad decisions that were made. So, there was running through a cornfield, getting separated from friends, jumping into a car of some people my age, who I didn’t know. to get back into town, I guess we were on the outskirts somewhere.

And I found my way back to my friend’s house that I was supposed to sleep at with a bunch of other people, but she wasn’t there. And I’m with a random assortment of other high school kids who randomly ended up in the same car as I did. And this guy Kevin – I remember his name is Kevin, but we didn’t know each other. Picture him like Anthony Michael Hall. So, he says, “You can sleep at my place.” And I say, “Okay!” And by his place, he means his parent’s place. We’re in high school.

On the way to his parent’s house, we figure that he’s going to carry me over his shoulders up the stairs, so his parents only hear one set of footprints. And we do this, and it works. And they even say like, “Hi Kevin!” or something. And he says, “Hey.” I’m sure he’s out of breath carrying me up the stairs. And I sleep in his twin size bed and I think he’s in his tighty whities and I’m fully clothed. And I don’t think I slept the whole night. And I remember in the morning, his mom knocked on the door and I rolled off the bed to hide and she didn’t see me.

And then somehow, he told me when the coast was clear, like when he was going down eat breakfast or something. And I went down the stairs quietly and got out of the house and got home and nobody was ever the wiser.

Nancy 15:03

It’s almost like that prayer or that poem that you see where there’s two sets of footprints on the beach. But then for a while, there’s only one and that’s because God is carrying you during that moment. I’m not making fun. I’m just saying it feels very similar. So Anthony Michael Hall carrying you over his shoulder in a really nurturing way. Thank you for telling that story, Ann. Glad you got away with that one.

The next one came in on Instagram from Lisa Lewis, who says, “One of my best friends bought me tickets to see Heart at the Paramount in Seattle for my 16th birthday. His mom dropped us off for the show, gave us $35 and told us to catch a cab home if she was not back by the end of the show. My friend thought she was joking. So he used some of the money to buy a T shirt. After the show, we waited out front, then went to the side door to watch the band leave the theater. When we went out front again to wait some more, it was getting close to midnight and the streets were empty.

There was no way I was going to call my parents. They didn’t like me going to Seattle, especially at night and they only let me go because his mom was dropping us off and picking us up. We scraped up $14 between the two of us and actually found a cab driver who agreed to drive us all the way back to the suburbs and drop us off at two different homes. I didn’t tell my mom about these shenanigans until I was in my 40s and she still got mad about it.”

I checked with Lisa after I’d read the story to thank her for sending it and it turns out the best friend who bought the concert tickets… that’s her husband. How cute is that?

 My beloved mother-in-law – everyone please say hi to Helen Kho who is dutifully hunkering down in Florida and staying at home like a champ. Right, Helen? She got a little over her skis herself as a kid one day and this is the story she sent in.

She says, “I was a good kid. But one summer day in seventh or eighth grade my best friend and I put on lipstick, a girdle and stockings and high heels and walked scuffing our heels over a mile to Wissahickon Park and then down Fairmount Park to Valley Green.” She’s a good Pennsylvania girl, my mother-in-law.

She says, “A Cub Scout troop saw us and the whole troop started running after us.” Now, here I had to call my mother-in-law to clarify whether it was in crazed hormonal pursuit or were they trying to mug the girls or what, and it was definitely the crazed hormonal pursuit. So back to the story: Cub Scout troop chasing Helen and her friend. She says, “Off came the heels and we ran like the wind until it was too stony and then we ran in bare feet laughing like crazy. Boy did our feet hurt when we got home. But we managed to get home with dignity. All mom said was, “Where were you?” And I just answered, “With Nancy.” Doesn’t it just figure that it was another Nancy who led her down the garden path? Helen, thank you for sending that story in.

Now, Lisa of the Fourteen Dollar Cab Fare had another story for this Over Our Head category. She says, “Another best friend and I had a temporary gig to deliver these booklets produced by our local hospital. They were to be dropped off on people’s doorsteps like the Yellow Pages. We delivered all the booklets except to one big neighborhood we could not find. Rather than drive around all day looking for it, we drove to Seattle (neither of us were allowed to drive to Seattle) to see the X documentary playing in the Market Theater in Post Alley in Pike Place Market. We never found the neighborhood and those booklets were in my car trunk for over a year until one day the two of us decided to dump them in a dumpster behind a business. I wish I could remember where we ditched them, not our finest move.”

That actually reminded me of a story I mentioned in the book how my first job I was a typist and I worked in a cage at the basement of this restaurant. I was not into that job very much for a number of reasons. But our duty everyday was to take a page from the Rochester phonebook and type envelopes with the street address. But for some reason, they had this special phonebook that was arranged by neighborhoods.

It would be all the homes on this street and all the homes on that street. And I would say probably every fifth week, I would realize at the end of my two hour shift of typing, that I’d either misspelled the street or I got in the wrong zip code or some other thing that rendered all of these envelopes I’ve been working on for two hours completely unusable. And the key was our supervisor always left for home a half an hour before we did. She worked a shorter day than we did.

So, I would just very quietly, without drawing any attention to myself, sweep all those envelopes into my school backpack and come home. And on my way back into the house through the garage, I would just dump all those envelopes into the garbage can and I would always try to find something to put over top of it so my parents would not notice that their daughter was a terrible typist who was just offloading pounds and pounds of envelopes into the garbage cans. So, you’re not alone, Lisa. I too wasted a lot of paper goods in the 80s.

The last one in this category of Over Our Heads came in from Arnell who starts with, isn’t this the truth… “Oh, man, it’s hard to remember the 60s.” She says, “I used to think I’d remember my high school hijinks but no. We used to hang out in the hills and party. I remember one time we got ambitious and drove to one of the local high schools and went skinny dipping. Another time, I arrived at Mount Tam late evening with two girlfriends and our sleeping bags and we spent the night there, which was not allowed. I must have been insane. No, just a teenager.” In fact, I might go back and just rename this section, “I must have been insane. No, just a teenager.”

[MUSIC]

This brings us to our final category, the one you’ve all been waiting for, Tales of Debauchery. These are the stories your kids wouldn’t believe even if you did tell them. And I’m just going to tear off the band aid with a terrible story told by one of my own dearest childhood friends about me. And I think the only thing you need to know is that S Kickers was a country and western line dancing bar that my parents and my older sister used to go to, and that her father was actually my boss. He ran the camp that I worked for. So, there are a lot of reasons why I would not want this story to get back to him, which maybe it will now.

Amy 20:51

Hey, Nancy. It’s Amy. I’m not sure you’re gonna want to use this one. But basically, the one that sticks out in my mind is when we had New Year’s Eve together. You were in ninth grade. And I was in seventh grade. And I’m pretty sure that your parents and Sally went to S Kickers for the night. And we hung out at your house with your parents’ drink recipe book and basically put things together that probably never belong together.

And I remember being pretty buzzed and Sally walking in the house before your parents and yelling at us to get upstairs as quickly as we could because we were so clearly hammered. Anyway, that’s the way I remember it. Not sure how you remember it or if you remember it, but I think that is pretty funny. And I have never told my parents that.

Nancy 21:36

You know, I was 100% ready to deny the story because honest to God, I have no memory of it. But the detail about my older sister coming in and saving our bacon, not to mention the specificity of the bar name where my parents and sister spent New Year’s Eve, that’s hard to deny. And it could be that I don’t remember that evening because I drank Bartles & Jaymes mixed with Bailey’s or something.

I called my sister Sally for verification who laughed and laughed and laughed and she said, “I totally remember that evening.” And, well, basically I was a terrible person as a kid. Update your contact lists accordingly. But you know who else was slightly terrible? The following people.

Here’s one sent in by Kellor. She says, “In high school, I worked at the Oakland Zoo and the food stands. During the early 70s, there were few rules. So, after we cleaned out the frozen ice cream machine, we would make frozen daiquiris. We then placed those in the empty five-gallon mustard jars.

We could go to outdoor concerts like Day on the Green where you could not bring drinks in, yet they never questioned our five-gallon mustard jars.” And that, my friends, is a story sent in by Kellor, my church’s youth leader. Up top for Episcopalians! You know what they say: Wherever four of us are gathered in your name, there’s sure to be a fifth.

This one, I agreed to run anonymously. Actually, she didn’t even ask for it to be anonymous. But after I read it, I know this person and I said, hey, maybe let’s take your name out. Because it’s great, but maybe she doesn’t want everyone to know. Although there are a couple identifying characteristics here, so some of you might be able to guess who this is. Here’s what she wrote. It’s a trifecta of shock and awe.

“When I was on a Semester at Sea College, two friends and I rented a convertible Jeep and drove across parts of Malaysia to a beach in Thailand. We ran into multiple groups of men who hassled us, but we just laughed and drove away. The little bungalows we stayed and barely had locks on them, and we did everything wearing bikini tops and shorts. I can’t even bear the thought of my daughter being so stupid.

Another time, we wanted to climb Mount Whitney and didn’t have a permit. So, we started in the middle of the night,” you know, as you do. “When we hit the part of the trail with snow I fell and ended up with the point of a crampons stuck in my thigh. We tied a dirty bandana around it and kept going. I still have the scar. We get cited by the park rangers for not having a permit, but I had a fake ID, so I’m sorry Catherine Eisenstein, if you ever got busted. My family does not know this part of the story.”

And finally, she sent in a music related one. She says, “My music related one is so gross. We drank a bunch of gin before walking over from USC to the LA Coliseum for the Joshua Tree concert. When everyone was standing, my friend threw up into the seat in front of her. We hustled her out of there, walked her back to the dorm, got her into bed and came back to the concert but not to those seats. So many bad decisions right there.” She writes, “I must stop. I can’t believe I’m still alive and that my kids might do these things and likely already have.” See, there’s the rub. We don’t know what our kids’ youthful shenanigans are. And we probably never want to know.

The next story comes in from Barry. He says, “In high school, I started going to some of the New York City punk clubs on weekends. Max’s Kansas City was my favorite but also CBGB and occasionally Hurrah or the Mudd Club. Of course, show started pretty late. So, I started to tell my parents that I was going to The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the 8th Street Playhouse. The midnight show allowed me to come home around 3am – a 45-minute subway ride and a mile walk back. My mother would say, “You’re going to that again?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, it’s fun! Lots of people dress up and they throw toilet paper at the screen!” something they would not do in the time of coronavirus, Barry adds.

A few years later in college, Barry says, “I actually saw Rocky Horror for the first time as I’d never actually seen it in high school. But I had seen the dictators, Patti Smith, Dead Boys and numerous others.”

Okay, so when I saw what Barry sent in, I figured it was finally time to share a particularly egregious stem winder of my own. This story… I tried to tell my mom about in my late 20s, and she put a finger on my lips and said, “Ssh, too soon.” And so, she doesn’t know this story, but now you’re about to.

It was probably 1985 or ‘86 in the summer, and I was home from college and working as a lifeguard at a condo complex where there were a lot of single parent families. And they would drop their kids off at the pool gate at 9am and pick them up at 5pm. And that’s how they got free babysitting and how I spent a summer pulling overconfident non-swimmers out of the deep end. It was mayhem. It was pretty fun, but it was mayhem. I rode my bike everywhere because I didn’t have a car and I was a third kid whose very loving parents were pretty much clocked out of active parenting. At that point, they were like, she’s fine. The other two are fine, she’ll be alright.

Anyhow, one night that summer, the Psychedelic Furs played a concert in Rochester, which I did not go to but later that same night, my friend Kitty and I went to our regular new wave dance spot called Idols. If you’ve read my book, you know that Kitty, who is still a very dear friend to me, figures into the majority of stories that I haven’t told my parents. So, if Kitty is in the cast of characters for a story, you know it’ll be good, and if it takes place at Idols in the 80s so much the better.

So anyway, Kitty and I are at Idols and who walks in? Not the Psychedelic Furs, I assure you, but their opening band, the Blow Monkeys, and not all of the Blow Monkeys I assure you. Certainly not lead singer Dr. Robert, but a Blow Monkey subset that comprised some roadies and you know, some other folks. Still, for Rochester in the 80s, that counts as a celebrity sighting. By the time Kitty and I left Idols that night, we had been invited to come to the see the Blow Monkey show the next night in Toronto, which is technically another country, even if it is only about a three and a half hour drive from Rochester.

We did what any ambitious young women would do in this situation. And I thank Erin for setting the table for the next sentence with her story at the top of the episode. We each told our parents we were sleeping at the other girl’s house for a couple of nights. My parents didn’t even question it. It wasn’t the first time. We really had done that a bunch in high school. But this was the first time we left the country instead. Together with our friend Carol, we popped up on over to Toronto using, like, a library card at the border –  that was back in the day when the Canadian/US border was basically Swiss cheese and you could just drive through whenever you wanted. So the three of us are all excited and honestly, I think I’m finally going to have my almost famous moment and go on tour with the band and I’m wondering what brand of beer they’re going to trade me for.

However, as soon as the subset Blow Monkey saw our car pull up to their tour bus, they run out, suitcases in hand, to tell us that after that night show is over, they’re stoked because they’ve got time to come back to Rochester. They have a couple of days off. And all my dreams of glamorous tour bus life shrivel up as we together with the subset Blow Monkeys cross the border back to my hometown for a couple of days.

Which is how the next day, I’m lifeguarding not just a pack of feral children from the condo, but four men who look like French fries that haven’t hit the oil yet. That’s how pale and skinny they were. Kitty’s gone to her summer job, so I guess it was my turn to babysit the subset Blow Monkeys that day. And that’s when my sweet dad pulls up to the pool in his car to bring me dinner as a surprise. At that point, he hadn’t seen me for a couple of days because I’ve been you know, “staying with Kitty.” And Dad’s been over at the pool all summer on and off, he comes to get me once in a while, and he realizes pretty quickly that four of these things are not like the others. And under his breath to me says, “Who the hell are those guys, Nance?

And with a grace and smoothness that shames me still, I threw Kitty straight under the bus I said, “Dad, they’re Kitty’s friends, I have no idea. You know how she hangs out with a strange crowd.” I may have even made a crazy sign with my finger circling my ear. And my dad who has known Kitty since she was six, he just goes “Okay,” and goes home. And my only comfort is knowing that had the tables been turned Kitty would have done the throwing just as easily.

And I will wrap this story up by saying that the subset Blow Monkeys were actually very nice guys and they headed off to their next show in Toledo, Ohio or some such with our best wishes but without Kitty and me. And when I found the Blow Monkeys Animal Magic album from 1986 for $1 in a bin at a flea market a few years back, I brought it home and you know what? That is a great, great album. It’s really held up good for them, animal magic. Download it today, it’s so good.

Okay, that’s the end of the debauchery, but I want to end on a much nicer note from a much better person. This came in on Instagram from Whitney of How She Moms. She says, “Oh man, I was way too good of a kid. I stole a Christmas light off someone’s house once for a scavenger hunt and I felt guilty for years. I was also involved in a toilet paper heist. I stood guard while my friend stole some TP from the school bathroom. We thought it would be funny to TP a teacher’s house with school toilet paper.” You know what sweet, sweet Whitney? We all wonder where that toilet paper is now, some of us could use it.

Okay, you guys hope that made you smile a time or two. If you want to share your own story of misspent youth with me, if this brought anything to mind, you can email me at [email protected], or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @midlifemixtape.

Make sure to share this episode with your friends. Everybody needs a laugh right now. And if you like the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, please consider leaving a review wherever you listen. Those really help the show get to the people who need to hear it.

And it’s time for the winner of the copy of The Thank-You Project! It’s going to Lisa Lewis, she of the $14 cab ride. Lisa, email me your snail mail address to [email protected] and we’ll get that underway.

Finally, I wanted to share a little snippet of the audio version of the book with you today. You may know that there are playlists in the book, and they’re displayed as these really cute cassette tape drawings. But when I was doing the audio recordings, and I got to those pages, the editor said, “Just riff on the playlist. Talk about why you chose some of the songs.” So that’s something that’s only in the audio version. And that’s what I pulled for today, the Feelings for Friend’s playlist for Chapter Three and me talking about what I did on it. So this is an excerpt from my audiobook edition of The Thank-You Project which you can download in full now anywhere you buy books and music online like Libro FM, audiobooks.com, Apple books, Google Play, Audible, Downpour, and Kobo to name a few.

Nancy Davis Kho – Excerpt from The Thank-You Project 31:44

Playlist for Feelings for Friends

I loved that in pulling this together, every genre from country to rap to alternative and to show tunes and every era of music was rich and choices of songs that celebrate friendship. It just tells you how universal the impulse is to express how we feel about our friends. I think some of these songs are probably meant as love songs. But if you think that’s the case, just play them again when you get to the next chapter.

So, starting off on side A: “We’re Going to be Friends” by White Stripes. “Friends” by Houdini, “You’re My Best Friend” by Queen, that had to be on there of course.  “Count on My Love” by Liz Phair, “The Promise” by When in Rome, “With a Little Help From My Friends” from the Beatles, that’s another one that I’m sure I would have been beaten up if I hadn’t included it. “You’ve Got a Friend” by Carole King. And the last song on side A, “I’ll Be There” by Jackson Five. That’s all we want from our friends’, right?

Flipping the tape over and starting on side B, starting with the best kind of friends, Garth Brooks brings us “Friends in Low Places,” you need them there too. “California Friends” is the next song by The Regrettes, “Thank You Friends” by Big Star, fun song from Sophie Tucker featuring, Nervo, The knocks and Alisa Nueno called “Best Friend,” “That’s What Friends Are For” by Dionne Warwick, and “Thank You for Being a Friend” by Andrew Gold. The last song on side B is “For Good,” from the Wicked Soundtrack and this one goes out to all the friends who mold us and then move on.

Okay guys, that’s it for today’s tales of youthful shenanigans. I hope and trust we’ll all be back to some midlife shenanigans soon and I’m sending you all a big virtual socially distance hug. Davis Kho out.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

The post Ep 71 Listeners’ Youthful Shenanigans appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .