Special Thanksgiving Edition 2008

Let's reminisce about Thanksgivings past. The one that comes to mind was in 1975. At the time, we were living in a house in Roselawn. It was owned by the state because they were buying up properties to build the Ronald Reagan Hwy. It actually took thirty years for the road to be built, but for the few years I lived there, with my mom and two sisters, the rent was dirt cheap.

This Thanksgiving in particular, the oven was broken. Not dead, but would only go up to about 200 degrees. None of us knew how to fix anything, and bringing in someone to fix it was definitely not something we could afford, so we would always learn to work around whatever the circumstance was.

So we cooked a turkey for like 12 hours until it was done. We had dinner at 2 a.m. I can't remember who all was there besides the four of us, but there were a lot of our friends there. Since it was so late, all of our friends had already fulfilled their family obligations, and they were all with us. It was the greatest dinner party of all time.

Living in that house taught me how to make lemonade when life gave us a lemon.

When Paula and Tami Went to Chicago in a Stolen Car

The following story took place during the first week of June in 1977.

School was out for the summer and Tami and I were out of a job. We both had jobs at Baskin and Robbins, where we were paid a dollar an hour under the table, and our employers had the audasity to pretend to tax it. One day we just revolted. Tami quit first, with me soon after.

So there we were, summer in the city, two fifteen year olds with nothing but time on their hands. Mostly what we did was hang around our old elementary school baseball field, usually sitting under these immense old oak tree's. We would do this for the next three months with no reprieve but the company of our friends whose lives were pretty much in the same crusty state as ours. Everybody we knew was bored!

On this particular day, we were sitting on the bleachers, which is something we almost never did. It was Tami, this girl named Barb, her husband and her two infants who were like nine months apart. Barb was eighteen, and her husbands name was Barry and one of the kids was Barry Jr. and I can't remember the other kids name so we'll just call him Curley. Barb was 4'9" on a good day, Barry was like 6'3" , and looked just like Abe Lincoln in all those pictures of Lincoln in his youth at his old Illinois (Kentucky) home kind of pictures. I didn't know Barb well, I knew of her, and she was three years older than us so I didn't really know her in elementary school. I think Tami may have known her better.

You could pretty much say that all of us were trailor trash, except for one thing! Me and Tam Tam are Jewish girls and there's no such thing as jewish trailor trash....the two things are diametrically opposed. On the other hand, Barb and Barry were not jewish so the trailor trash impression is pretty much dead on.

Anyway, we're sitting on the bleachers bitching about how there's nothing to do in Cincinnati and that we would die from boredom and so on. Barb looks at us and says "we're driving to Chicago, why don't you two come along for the ride?"

These were magic words for two bored girls who were to0 young to drive themselves on a road trip, but had the itch to travel even at that age. We decided that, yes, this would be a most excellent summer getaway, we would just hop into Barry's big fat pimp daddy Buick looking car and drive west off into the sunset. Too bad we didn't know that Barry's idea of a "getaway" was much more literal than our own version, and very different as well.

The first step of our plan would be the most difficult; talking (read: conning) our mothers into letting us go to Chicago with people we didn't really know much about. TO BE CONTINUED

When Paula and Tami Went to Chicago in a Stolen Car

The following took place during a one week period in June of 1977.

Tami and I were inbetween jobs. We quit our job at Baskin and Robbins where they paid us a dollar an hour under the table and still had nerve to take out taxes. It's hard finding a job at 15.

Anyway, we had nothing but time on our hands. One of the things that Tam and I have in common is our wunderlust. We LOVE a roadtrip of any kind.