2001-06-15

Judy, Judy, Judy...

I get these periodic melancholic pangs for old friends from high school and college. (Oddly enough, I have no interest whatsoever in contacting too many folks from grad school, probably because I failed to make any great, lasting friendships there, because I was more interested in drinking $3 Rolling Rocks and watching bands than in nursing $6 cocktails and bitching about how many stupid, glossy quarterlies were rejecting my short stories. But I digress.)

I get this way, and I start literally mooning over lost friends, wondering if I'll ever see them again, and wouldn't it be great if I could just run into them, like, on the subway or whatever? Sometimes, I'll even go so far as to conduct little online investigations, which of course always screams "Stalker," to me at least; I'm certainly always a little freaked out when I check my tracker and see that somebody found me by entering my full name into Google. Such are the perils of eschewing anonymity in one's diary in the hopes of being an online Lana Turner.

At any rate, sometimes these searches do reap rewards: this week I got back in touch with a great pal of mine from college. So it gets me to wanting to find more friends. Like Judy.

Judy was my best friend in junior and senior year of high school. We bonded over a common love for Throwing Muses, R.E.M., and basically anything else that wasn't Motley Crue (of course, as regular readers of this diary know, recently I've come out of the closet and admitted that I secretly love all that shit; I actually bought, and finished in less than two days, this amazing autobiography of the Crue, and you can borrow it, only if you leave the dust jacket, call me every night to tell me how far you've gotten, and write me a ten-page report, double-spaced, with no higher than a 10 point font and 1" margins on either side.)

Judy was a freak, and I mean that in the best possible way, since I myself was a freak. Not since early childhood had I met another girl as disgusting and willing to publicly make an ass of herself as I was. Our favorite game was to make up songs about people we didn't like, whether they were jocks, or in the case of poor Steve Bradshaw (not his real name) -- guys that genuinely liked and admired us and wanted to be our friends. Pssh! We didn't dislike Steve by any means, but for some reason one afternoon, while ditching class and hanging out in the auditorium (where we also created a game, along with a fellow reject named Frank, called - appropriately enough - "Auditorium Reaper," which consisted of us turning out all of the stage lights, closing all of the curtains to create, in effect, three fabric-enclosed corridors, and wandering up and down said corridors while Frank jabbed through the curtains with a mop handle.) we made up a song about him, complete with hand gestures (ironic, since we both also despised the cheerleaders), that I still catch myself singing under my breath in times of duress (it actually kind of calms me down):

"His name is Steve Bradshaw / Steve Brad-shaw / IIIII love his name / 'cuz 'Steve' / rhymes with 'heave' / rhymes with 'sleeve.'"

It's important to note that at 'heave," Judy and I would both double over clutching our stomachs, and at 'sleeve,' we'd drag our arms across our noses. Charming, no?

From my high school yearbook, 1988, scrawled within the borders of an ad for a place called "Poopsies":

Lisa, one night Marc, Seth and I went to the below mentioned bar/restaurant to see Brad (now very bleached hair) do a one man show (a very degrading experience for him, I believe). Anyway they have great pizza and Brad's bass patch sucked. That doesn't account for this shitty cover band playing Senior Night and, more embarrassingly, the crowd's enthusiastic response. Oh well. They'll never learn & we'll always be different, and know better. We are going out tomorrow, but if you're reading this in the future (the mother of 20,000,003 smelly children), remember, I'll miss the times we had and I hope you weren't too scared when I hit that snowbank (oops). Well...we'll be famous, right? & we'll outbid each other for Elvis Costello's underwear or something. Good times? Hell, no. Fuckin' great times. love, Jude

I haven't seen Judy in at least ten years, and my online searches have always yielded nothing. My sister says, "Well, why don't you call her parents or something if they still live in town?" Are you kidding? That's way too proactive for me....

lisamcc at 2:27 p.m.

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