At the Disco

I don't have memories of playing with my sisters when we were kids the way other people do with their siblings, mainly because we weren't kids at the same time. My oldest sister started college when I was a few months old, and the next two were married and out of the house by the time I was six. Even Countrygirl, who's the next one up, got married when I was in the 8th grade. But don't feel bad for me just yet. Because I had my cousins.

Okay, follow this if you can. My mom's sister Simone is only 2 years younger than she is, and my grandmother's rule was that they weren't allowed to go anywhere the other wasn't invited. So they were pretty much inseperable.

My dad has a cousin a year older than him, and while my dad grew up in a house full of kids, Marcel was an only child, so the two of them were best friends. They were pretty much inseperable.

My parents grew up, met, fell in love, and got married. But Marcel was away with the navy at the time of the wedding and couldn't get leave, and someone else had to stand in as best man, so Marcel and Simone didn't meet. At the wedding, Marcel's mother kept telling Simone how perfect she would be for her son. Simone jokingly began referring to her as her mother-in-law. Hilarity all around. So imagine her surprise much later when a boy she meets at a dance brings her home to meet his parents, and she finds... you guessed it. My great-aunt. Yes, my mother's sister and my dad's cousin met independently of them, fell in love, and got married two years after my parents. The couples were pretty much inseperable.

My parents started having kids right away, and had 3 in five years. Simone and Marcel, much to their unhappiness, weren't able to have kids of their own. So Simone set out to be the most fun aunt EVER. It's from her that I learned so many of my cool aunt tricks. She's also the woman who used to encourage my sisters, when one of them wanted to do something my mom wouldn't allow, to "Cry. Cry and maybe she'll let you." Yeah, I'll bet that won big points with mom.

But wait. There's more. My mom took 6 years off from having kids (I'm sure her uterus thanked her), and then had Countrygirl. You can imagine everyone's surprise when after all those years of trying, Simone got pregnant at the same time. They had daughters 4 months apart. The 2 families were... say it with me now... pretty much inseperable. Fast forward eight years to the blessed event that was the unplanned birth of me. (My mommy says I wasn't an accident, just a pleasant surprise. She thought I was the beginning of menopause. Surprise!!) A year later to the month, 9 years after her first child, my aunt had Missy. So now you've got best friends marrying best friends, 2 sets of matching daughters (distinguished as the "big girls" and "little girls") and 2 families that were pretty much inseperable. We did everything together--holidays, weekends, vacations... we bought campers, parked them near one another at the same campground, and spent all summer together every summer until we were grown. Along the way my aunt and uncle adopted Missy's best friend Christina, who was 5 months younger than Missy, and that was it.

Pretty much every memory I have from childhood involves the two of them. We rode bikes and swam and rollerskated. We played house and school. We spied on the big girls. But my favorite game, the one I remember most vividly, was Disco. They had a long living room the entire width of their house, and on weekend nights it was ours to play in while the grown-ups sat in the dining room, chatting, the men playing cards. We'd shut off the lights, and that room was transformed. We were grown-up sisters, very sophisticated and beautiful, and we owned the coolest disco in town. (Yes, I know I'm dating myself. But this was the early 80s. It wasn't a club. It was a disco.) We would go early to set up, and bring our kids with us. Our Cabbage Patch kids would be lined up on the couch, and our imaginary older kids would play on their own. (I always had like seven of them...) But that was just for set-up. Because when it was time for the disco to open, our husbands would come get the kids to take them home and watch them, and we would work the disco. I'm so proud of our little liberated selves, I could just burst. How many little girls' fantasies involved being working mothers with stay-at-home dads??

Our disco played one album, and one album only. REO Speedwagon's Hi Infidelity on vinyl, borrowed from the girls' older sister.

To this day, that album still makes my all-time list of "If I were stranded on a desert island" CDs. And either Keep on Loving You or Take it On the Run would make my all-time favorite songs list, but which one depends on the day. Missy and Christina even had a whole dance rountine worked out to Follow My Heart. And make no mistake. Our disco was the place to be, and the floor was packed with dancers, but those imaginary party-goers cleared the floor to watch the girls strut their stuff.