25 Years Ago????

This picture was taken 25 years ago, in May of 1982. Holy shit, where has the time gone? It was spring break of my senior year of high school and I had been staying at my oldest sister's house after a bit of a row with my mom. All of my friends were in college and somehow I got myself invited along on a road trip to Daytona Beach with seven guys from SLU and Parks College. My boyfriend at the time, who hung out with all these guys, had to go home to New Jersey and couldn't make the trip. I was feeling adventurous, and I'd never been to Florida, so why the hell not? It was a disparate group, but they were all pretty decent guys and not too party crazy.

The picture was taken after our first full day on the beach. I laid in the sun for around eight hours. When I stood up to go back to the hotel room, I fell to my knees and passed out in the sand. At this point I'm sure the boys were lamenting bringing a high school girl along. Anyway, I woke up, they got me a big cup of ice water and we went to sit in that cool, shady underpass where the picture was taken. Beside me is James, one of the most beautiful men I've ever seen, as you can clearly see. He was from Boston, was terribly vain, and said "idear" in the cutest way.

I managed to make it out to dinner that night -- I think we discovered an all-you-can-eat spaghetti place that accomodated our very limited budgets, but after that I was pretty much confined to the hotel room; burnt to a crisp, swollen, and sickly. I was kept company with one of the boys who suffered the same fate as me. At one point I was staring at my swollen, burnt arm and it looked exactly like a hot dog about to split open.

The drive home was pretty miserable as it was my backside that was the most burnt, plus we had some car problems. When I finally got back to my sister's (she knew where I had gone) we decided I needed to go to the hospital. Since for insurance purposes I had to go the hospital that my mom worked at, we had to think of a lie to tell about the circumstances of my sunburn. I said that I had gone to Kansas City with girlfriends and had fallen asleep under a sun lamp. Who knows if the doctor believed me, but I KNEW that if I told the truth, my mom would find out, confidentiality rules be damned. So I was diagnosed with a UTI and first degree burns and sent home to pick layers and layers of skin off my back, arms and legs. My sister had to vacuum daily around me to pick up all the skin. It was pretty gross.

But anyway, that's one of my favorite photos ever. James is posing, as always, dyed black, new wave spiky hair is documented and we look like we're in some exotic third world country, not just mundane Daytona Beach.