Talkin' 'bout Bad Girls

Ooohhh... I've been so bad! Not BAD bad - just a little bit bad. But what scares me - again, just a little bit - is my current overwhelming desire to be a teen-movie-sidekick, Fonzie's- girlfriend, underaged-guitarist-with-mutliple-tattoos kind of bad.

Lori Singer in 'Footloose' bad, is what I'm talkin' about. Lord, just let me crawl from one moving pickup truck to another, PLEASE.

For some reason, I've been gripped with a middle-aged angst and rebellion that is really more suitable to the stereotype of the silver-haired cad with the new roadster and Hooter's girl companion. Not that I want those things - well, I'll take the hooters.

But still - I have an impulse to flip off every mom who hangs out by the preschool door peering in for the smallest sign of their precious child's undeniable bliss, I want to shock other moms by sending my kids to school with paper bags for lunch sacks instead of monogrammed Veras, and, naturally, I crave the use of unabashed profanities at basketball games and other sporting events that I only remotely pay attention to anyway.

WHAT IS UP???

Obviously, those are not behaviors I would give in to. But I have given into a few as of late. Want to know what they are??? Only one's actually bad... But I'll save that one for later.

I'll start with last spring. I was dying to 'go out' - with a female friend, spontaneously, to have a couple of drinks and chitty-chat. Not that I don't go out with friends, but I never do so randomly and without the orchestration required to pull off the Normandy invasion.

So I called a friend, and her husband was cool with it (as was mine - love you, Honey). I walked across the street to pick her up and then we headed to rockin' downtown Summerville - yes , the epicenter of cool.

The first place we visited was a local pub inhabited by a circle of geriatric rednecks who patted their laps and said, "Gotta seet fer ya raht heer..." Or so it sounded - kind of hard to understand with only seven teeth amongst them.

Needless to say, we left. Immediately. We found another place nearby instead (why, oh, why?), grabbed a table, and ordered beers. Not long afterwards, an aging man with a very obtrusive cowboy hat sidled up to my friend and reintroduced himself. Apparently, she and his wife had been in the same playgroup some time ago.

Well. Not anymore. Because he was newly divorced and looking for some comp'ny. In my friend. And it was not good. It was, in fact, 'oogey'. So again, we left.

So much for our night of debauchery.

Later that summer, another friend and I cashed in our Mother's Day gifts from our husbands of spa treatments followed by some alone time at a neighborhood pool. Of course, that included lunch first, which of course included some Firefly vodka. See how bad we are?

No, that's not too bad... but staying at the pool for TEN HOURS - including through a thunderstorm and drinking steadily the whole time? Well, that may have been taking slight advantage of our gift. Not that we cared. It was AWESOME!!! And we did have one little bad moment when, half-lit, we decided it would be fun to sneak over to some friends' house nearby and give an impromptu puppet show in their kitchen window.

Which never happened because our friends were out of town. And we didn't have any puppets with us.

BUT...

Last week a friend of mine who teaches emailed me one morning because her daughter was home sick with the flu. Said friend wanted to go get a pedicure, and did I want to go, too? She had a sick child, I had no money, but what the hell??? YES, I want to go! So I met her, sang Olivia Newton-John songs to the nice Korean man who massaged my calves, and was basically useless for the rest of the day. And her daughter got her nails done, too. Yay for us!

Was that bad? Not necessarily, but to me it felt downright scandalous. Because I never, ever spend money unless I'm getting groceries out of it.

There have been a few other bad incidents tossed in here and there: my same friend who spent the day (and night) at the pool with me recently interrupted my run to go with her for an aimless convertible ride. For me, that's bad -I live for my run. I flirted shamelssly with a bartender at a fundraiser. For the second time (he had tended bar at another function over Christmas). I ate a Whopper Junior at midnight. And...AND... here is the really bad thing...

I smoked a Marlboro Light at the SPCA Oyster Roast. Yes, I did. Someone offered me a drag, and boy, I didn't have to think twice.

And I have to admit, it was YUMMY. (No, I don't smoke - hence the 'bad' factor.)

So, there you have it. I am a very, very, very bad person. If you don't believe me, just ask Fonzie, because I'm sure he's got some stories he could tell you...