In her bedroom, half a flight up the 1959 Split-level Ranch with pink brick and putty colored paint, I’d fidget with Megan’s funky, multi-colored fiber optic lamp, while she played records and introduced me to jazz - Sydney Bechet, Mezz Mezzrow, Preservation Hall, and her very favorite, The Samuel Dent Memorial Jazz Band.
She had a thing for the coronet player.
And there we’d wait until it was time for her parents to go out and best friends to descend upon the many leveled house, like chubby ants to a picnic.
We’d relish this time, void of family law, to nurture our own hand-picked clan, filled with constantly morphing personalities, birthed from overactive glands and imaginations - and recently recognized skills - whether poet, actor, musician, Pig Out Queen, Homecoming Queen, Make Out Queen, or Dancing Queen.
Never enough crowns.
Never enough room on the dance floor.
Though clumsy and shy, my pelvic-thrusting friends showed great determination in making me try; in making me jump and jive, shake my groove thing, and Hustle across nearly every inch of the wall to wall carpet in the green and gold metallic wallpapered, ground level living room of Megan’s 1959 Split-level Ranch.
Sweating and spinning and dipping.
Smoking and joking and choking with laughter.
Air Band greats ever in the making.
Using voices and faces to find inner traces of people we know and meet; and songs (mostly carols) to share a new knowledge of the male anatomy; writing lyrics using every dirty word puerile minds could muster to fluster, shock and repulse.
And in between dancing and smoking and singing, years of piano lessons colored the scene, mixing Joplin, Pachelbel and Winston into the frenetic hours of being girls, and teens.
Ceasing only long enough to replenish.
Which is why a half floor lower was, to us, a fairytale kingdom of tightly sealed snacks of caramels and pretzels, Chex mix and cookies - wafer, fudge stripe, shortbread, sugar.
Tupperware and tins of sweet and salty things that were there for the taking.
Yet it wasn’t the sweets I liked most to eat at the putty-colored home. My favorite treat could not be found in the underground realm of infinite munchies and After School Specials, but in the kitchen pantry above. Something I’d never had before entering Megan’s house, and to this day, still have absolutely no willpower to pass up…SpaghettiOs.
Yes, that’s right. SpaghettiOs.
However, Mom wouldn’t buy it, so I had to sneak it. Which I did, at Megan’s 1959 Split-level Ranch; where friends and friendships were allowed to be a lot like that can of SpaghettiOs:
Deliciously saucy, indulgent, effortless, full of crap, and distinctly gratifying.
