Dead Girls Don't Dance

I’ve just recently seen, in person, these dear dear people for the first time in FOR EVER, and I’ve been doing a damnable lot of little-girlish squealing the last few days. The MILF on the left is Nichole, and the handsome fellow in the middle is my brother Gabriel. (Technically, we’re more like shirt-tail cousins, but I’m not going to get into the tortuous morass of Southern relationships right now.) Obviously, I must be the escaped mental patient on the right. We used to call ourselves the Deadbeat Club, after the B-52s song.

I was good, I could talk
A mile a minute,
On this caffeine buzz I was on
We were really hummin’
We would talk every day for hours
We belong to the deadbeat club…

And so on. We shared an apartment long, long ago, and seemed to spend most of our spare time in loitering in cafes, lurching around in clubs, or running all over town on bizarre, hilarious expeditions orchestrated by Nichole’s brother Stephen, the ringleader/criminal mastermind of the household. He’s not in the above photo because (a) he took it, and (b) wasn’t really quite in the Deadbeat Club because despite consuming truly heroic amounts of coffee, he never spiked it with liquor first thing in the morning, and generally spent FAR too much of his time sober to qualify for full membership.

Be that as it may, the whole gang of four got together today, naturally in a coffee shop, and no doubt annoyed the other patrons with our (loud) incessant laughing, teasing each other mercilessly, and telling each other stories complete with appalling sound effects. We had a wonderful time; when we weren’t reminiscing (meaning: reminding each other of tomfoolery that one or more of us didn’t remember due to being extremely drunk at the time it occurred), we discussed current events and our own present lives, and it almost felt like we were picking up a conversation right where it left off twenty years ago.

I’m failing to come up with a closing paragraph that isn’t sappy, so I’ll leave you with what happens when somebody points a camera at Nichole before she assures herself that her hair and makeup is acceptable:

This post was brought to you by the burn unit at Shands Hospital.