It's a Party!

What better reason to get dressed up than Saturday night! For most of us up on the restaurant food chain we had graduated from working Sunday brunch. For the rest, a little hangover made omelette's slide easier onto plates. Bags were brought filled with high heels, make-up, tight pants, and sultry dresses. After slinging dishes and waiting on customers it was time to party! We all piled into one changing room to beautify ourselves for a night on the town. All the men were gay, the straight men never lasted. All the women were horny heterosexuals. We all dressed together exchanging make-up tips and sharing a mirror that was vertical for lipstick and horizontal for a pre-party pick-me-up.

Where to go? Who thought they would get lucky and most important to the kitchen staff on hourly pay, where was it cheap? The ‘trons, flush after a night of tips took us under their wings and spent money with abandon forgetting about rent and essentials. An agenda was agreed upon and we teetered into cabs and cars for the evening’s excitement.

The world of girls and gays in the 80’s was a rite of passage for us all. Cyndi Lauper summed it up; “Girls just want to have fun.” Yes, it would have been nice to end the night with a romp in the hay after a steamy dance but dancing and humping never went together when you went out with the boys in the band. And the boys were so much fun!! We drank the same watered down cocktails, discussed the same tight pants and bulges. Both sexes were drooling with only the boys having the slightest chance of getting lucky. We danced with hedonistic abandon, both sexes knowing that at the last Donna Summers song we would careen out of the bar and into bed alone.

Some boys, ever opportunistic, continued on to the Charles River Fens to roam the parked cars for anonymous sex. In the early morning's mist the boys still went home alone to sleep off their night on the town. This wasn’t an option for the real girls and we went our separate ways.

We thought it would never end the way it did with AIDS and death of many friends. For that narrow window of time we were all invincible and would live forever.