Becka's Epic Adventures: Nostalgia

Prepare for a series of very nostalgic posts. I un-earthed my scrapbooks and found lots of pictures...

A few weeks ago I got to have a Girl's Night with my oldest friends. While our reason for assembling was not quite happy, it was a great opportunity to reminisce about all the adventures we've had. These girls have been my friends for more than a decade. Since we graduated high school they've all gotten married and had children (I think there's 9 kids in this group altogether), but we still maintain some contact, and that's been great. I'm not really sure how to remember 15 years of friendship in one blog post, but here's a shot.

I met Vanessa when I was in 2nd grade, but it wasn't until 7th grade, when Candace, Trudy, and Vikki all moved to Clinton, that we all became really great friends. Oh what a magical time, we spent most afternoons playing basketball, wandering the neighborhood, and watching awesome movies (I know I'll never forget "The Craft" and the impression it made on our group). Some other wonderful people (including Traci, who's in several of these pictures) came into our group of friends. I've got a pretty terrible memory, but that does confer at least one advantage: what I remember of the past (which we'll call 1997-2002) is all fun and happiness. Then I dug out my old pictures and discovered that while we might have been having a lot of fun, we seemed to take inordinate delight in taking bad pictures of one another. It took a lot of work to find pictures that wouldn't be labelled "embarrassing" (consisting mostly of bad, early morning faces), but here's what I came up with.

Four of us, circa 1997. Obviously, we've been hard core from the beginning.

Remember when photo booths were actually booths? We were quite fond of those in the late 90s, as pictured below.

Notice people magically disappearing from the booth. Also note our clear love of fun scissors.

I think this illustrates one of the key parts of our group dynamic: picking on Trudy. Trudy is one of the most delightful people I know, and one of the shortest. In the series above you can see four of us, until the last frame when Vanessa decided to be the biggest part of the pictures. It was hilarious. I can't say this is the only series of pictures where Trudy disappeared from the shot. Luckily, she's very photogenic in the pictures I have of her, and managed to be a good sport through all of this.

Dancing was a big part of our activities, and we were awesome at it:

Oh jorts. I miss you.

I really started developing my own musical tastes during this period. Before then I listened to the same radio stations my parents did (and I will always and forever love Billy Joel, Chicago, and Elton John because of that), but around 12 or 13 I started being more influenced by the things my friends listened to. We sure loved Alanis Morisette and No Doubt, but if pictures are any indication, we were also heavily influenced by the Spice Girls:

According to the caption from the scrapbook we created, this is Posh, Baby, Scary, Ginger, Sporty, and Sexy Spices.

Here is what we were going for:

Sleepovers were a big part of things. Early on, we had a lot of sleepovers at Candace's, mostly because her place was awesome, but also because we might have had less supervision there. I can now say, we totally should have been supervised more.

There are many, many more pictures from said sleepovers. But everyone has just woken up in all of them, so I've decided to leave them boxed up.

Occasionally we tried cooking, which is what is pictured below. It just kills me how beautiful these girls are. Cooking was rarely successful in these days, but they've since managed to raise their children past infancy, so I image their skills in the kitchen have improved significantly.

One of my all-time favorite memories is the time Vanessa and I tried making chocolate pudding from scratch (I'd say we were in 9th grade at the time). It started out very promising, we simply needed to dump all the ingredients into a pot and boil for a few minutes. However, during this short boiling period, we got distracted trying to light a gerbil cage on fire (there were no gerbils in the cage, we weren't horrible people, after all) and forgot about the pot of boiling cocoa until at least half an hour later (probably more). By that point it had become a pot of burnt chocolate-ness, a few inches think. The loss of promising pudding is tragic enough, but it gets worse - my mom cleaned the whole mess up. I don't know how we got out of that.

Lagoon was another part of growing up for us. Whenever I get annoyed at groups of teenagers, I try to remember how obnoxious we must have been, especially at Lagoon. One of our favorite things to do was ride the Sky Lift (just a shuttle back and forth across the park) and count how many people would say "Hi" to us if we said "hi" to them. It was silly, and we didn't have a great success rate. We also used to try riding the White Rollercoaster with our lap bars as loose as possible. In hindsight that was silly. But also awesome.

In line at Lagoon

We all started High School in 1999, and looking back at a lot of my pictures, I can see why I may have chosen to remember so little of that period. Everyone was dating during this time, and there was so much awkwardness I started blushing just looking at the pictures. The elaborate ways we had to ask people out, the awkward hand positioning during pictures, spinning around in circles for hours on end... But we obviously thought these things were worth documenting. I haven't included many of the pictures here, in part because of the awkwardness, and in part because everyone (but Candace) has married other people and there's no need to dredge up old boyfriends. The dresses and hair were definitely worth preserving though, because it was awesome to dress up. Observe:

Prom 2002.

I just love this picture. I think Vanessa and I made awesome fairies. 2001-ish

Obviously, we were hot stuff.

And remember how I mentioned Candace, just a second ago? She married to her high school sweetheart Jon, and they're just as adorable together now as they were then:

Sometimes I feel a little left out, when I think of the hairstyles popular during my time in high school, so little we have to regret. With the exception of butterfly clips, there wasn't really much to cringe about. Trudy was perhaps our most daring, when it came to hair, as illustrated in the platinum blond below:

For the most part, my friends and I couldn't be considered rebellious. But Vanessa and I did have a flair for ditching school. The most awesome time was the when we left school to visit the zoo. With a camera.

I dare anyone to try looking this cool in an egg.

Some of us got cars during this time (you'll find a blog about my chariot, Gus, after this one). It was pretty rad to cruise around the suburbs, but we felt down right cool going to Salt Lake City every once and a while. However, we were by no means rich, so once we got to the city, we found free things to do, like going to the pioneer museum:

Remembering what awful drivers we were (yes, all of us were legitimately terrible drivers) is one of the few things that pains me about this time. I recall rolling my eyes every time a driver's ed teacher would tell us "You think you're invincible, but you're not. Slow down and wear your seat belt." Without any irony, I recall thinking "I don't think I'm invincible, but I'm going to drive as fast as I want without my seat belt on. Nothing bad is going to happen to me." This feels especially stupid when I recall how many things we all rear-ended and drove head-on into, the number of speeding tickets we received, and the number of cars that were totalled (which is exactly what we did during our last girls night). But we all lived through it, and for the most part, everyone seems to have slowed down, started checking their blind spots before making lane changes, and stopped backing over stuff. For the most part.

After high school, we all generally stayed in northern Utah. Some of us went to college, all but one got married and had children, and the Facebook became a thing. It's been pretty great to keep track of these lovely ladies as our lives have become more hectic. But it's even better when we get to catch up in person and reminisce about days gone by and laugh. Oh so much laughing. I don't think I'd have grown up to be the same person I am without my awesome friends. And I look forward to several more decades full of memories and such. Love you ladies.