Brenda Walsh lost her virginity exactly one week before I lost mine.
Sure, the sex variables between a fictional character and me differed slightly from one another. Brenda got laid for the first time in a five-star hotel room with a gorgeous guy who looked about thirty-seven years old on the night of her Winter Dance. I reached that milestone in my friend’s bed with a rather handsome boy who looked seventeen. In fact, he had just turned seventeen. It was both of our first times and it was his birthday – and I still maintain it was the single finest birthday gift I’ve ever given to anyone.
Besides the concurrent loss of a hymen, Brenda Walsh and I didn’t really have all that much in common. We were both brunettes and we both went through an unfortunate stage where we showed up at school wearing hats for a while, but that was really it. I didn’t harbor a bile-stinging envy of my friends like Brenda did and each of my eyes was exactly the same size as the other. I didn’t have a gorgeous twin brother and I never absconded to Mexico with a guy my parents had forbidden me to so much as glance at and I didn’t have a conflicted relationship with my father because mine died before he ever had to deal with things like my breasts developing. I didn’t live in a hacienda-style house on the west coast and I never gobbled down U4EA at a club. I never once single-handedly saved a girl’s life by talking her down from committing suicide on a prevention hotline, though I did lose a boy I once thought I truly loved to a friend I believed would never ever betray me in much the same way Kelly Taylor betrayed Brenda with Dylan. But on the positive side, at least I never had to eat a mega-burger while some guy named Nat stared at me and called me “sweetheart.”
I would have, of course, written a post sooner, but I have spent most of my free time in the shower over the last few days. See, I’ve been scrubbing my skin with coconut exfoliator from The Body Show and scratchy loofah mitts and with something that might have been rubbing alcohol, but I’m really not sure. I just know that it smelled potent enough to do the job of disinfecting me.
It’s taken me days to try to rid myself of the mental grime that was caused by closely following the tale of a Real Housewife sentenced to incarceration, and just when I thought I could handle the cruel world again, along came Tori Spelling with the next season of her show that I believe was pitched to the network with a high concept like this: Cameras will invade my home and the personal space of my young children while I fight to prove to the world that I can make my marriage work and also eat a sushi roll. And you know what? We’ll get to Ms. Spelling and her jutting clavicle in just a moment, but I’m gonna come right out and say that I no longer fully begrudge her the right to have snagged a financial opportunity out of a moment of real-life infidelity. Own it, lady – therapy for four kids will not be cheap.
It used to be talent that garnered someone fame.
I think back to the walls of my bedroom back when I was in high school. I didn't have a mother who refused to let me tape things to the paint, something I appreciated like crazy, so my room was plastered with images. There was a huge staggered collage of photos of my friends. It was back before cell phones, when you couldn't flip through a photo gallery with a distracted thumb. Photos back then were kept in frames or placed neatly into albums, protected by a plastic cover that made a Velcro sound when it was pulled back. I had albums too, but I liked to see my pictures constantly so I kept them on my wall.
