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Heather Gordon Ride With Me |
In coming to the horrifying realization that last week was my last official Spring Break (need I more incentive for grad school?), I feel the need to write a tribute to the adventures of breaks past, present and future.
Some take the jaunt to a hot southern locale that brings them back with both sun and alcohol poisoning, in addition to a fresh case of venereal disease, the visit-a-friend break, the job-hunt break, or even the alternative spring break to a new location in the interest of helping underprivileged communities. But since I've got the column, I'm going to tell you all about the glamorous vacations that I have had.
For my first two years of college, I hopped on the cheapest Northwest direct back to Beantown in order to sit on my sofa to watch movies and not get tan. One year, I actually watched so much TV as to conclude that since Hollywood is obviously filled with all these Adonis-like bohunks, there really must just be a plethora of them in society and I - the goddess that I am, don't you know - should settle for no less than your standard Mel Gibson-type astrophysicist. Gladly, I've since snapped back to reality. The perk was that my best friend from high school had the same break as me, so we could sit home together. Or, rather, Tracie and I sat at our respective houses and chatted on the phone for free as opposed to the usual 12 cents per minute or whatever we standardly have to pay to repeat the same conversations we've been having since we were 10. Last year, Tracie and I happened to be studying abroad in London, so our spring holiday became reason to further explore the UK.
We spent two weeks (with another friend of mine from the University) doing the standard Yank-with-a-backpack routine, staying in hostels and meeting fellow travelers and friendly locals. A certain one of us found Inverness to be not only the home of the Loch Ness monster, but also a real hotbed of love, if you know what I mean, which just goes to show that sometimes you can go for the VD without the sun poisoning. All that highland air has a strange effect on the libido, I guess. Like the Santa Ana winds, but different. Perhaps the hormones are triggered by the wind whipping through the kilts of all those Scotsmen going commando, but then again, I'm no chemical analyst.
And finally this year: a family ski vacation to Colorado that centered around my cousins' and my valiant efforts to breathe some fun into Vail's stale nightlife (what can one really expect of such a posh and shi-shi place as that? The richies there are too busy stroking their fur coats and sipping their Chateau Rothschild to appreciate a good disco night), being an obnoxious enough brat to make my loving mother rescind her offer to let me move home after graduation (no, Ma, the cardboard box is terribly comfy and there's some nice ventilation by that subway grate, too), burning my face in effigy of "The English Patient" on the sunny back bowls of the mountain, and walking around in some generally goofy and uncomfortable clothes. Fortunately, I had just enough presence of mind to plan to go further west to Seattle for the last leg of my journey and visit my old roommate Rachel, who gave me the most phenomenal Cameron Crowe tour of the city. I saw the mall where Lloyd Dobbler and Dianne Court had their first date. I rode the roller coaster where Kyra Sedgewick was dumped by her boyfriend. I walked around the apartment complex where "Singles" was filmed.
But my fearless tour guide Rachel would not let the fun stop there. Our little foray into Seattle nightlife revealed a gothic bar featuring people wearing more black than a panther at a funeral. The lovely bartendress, upon second glance, turned out to be a man in spiky black lingerie drag. I got stepped on by some darling gent who was doing his best impression of Tommy from The Who, and was mesmerized by some Axl Rose wannabe who was grooving with himself on what appeared to be one sweet heroin/ecstacy party. Not to mention two spastic Irish guys doing arhythmic modern jazz which centered around writhing around on the floor. And let's not forget the obligatory couple who were getting on each other in the back ("He's gonna pork her dad! Right there at the table!") So after Rachel and I were through frowning on the sidelines, playing the normal white girls in the Land of the Lost, we decided it better to join the fun. A vacancy opened up on the elevated stage and yours truly did her best Jessica Hahn and pole-danced the night away to songs with lyrics like "Death is all around us / There's a dead fly on the windscreen." When in Rome, right?
So anyhow, that's the final chapter in my book on Spring Breaks. I now pass the torch onto you, my prodigies, the future partyers of American Youth. And as for me, I think I'll be filling out those grad school applications.
- Heather Gordon can be reached over e-mail at yutz@umich.edu