Lights Out
Every girl has a slumber party story. Many of them are fraught with girl-drama, Dirty Dancing and ill-fated Truth or Dare games.
Here are a couple of my stories.
9th Birthday
I had a very large slumber party. I specifically didn’t invite this one girl, but she showed up anyway. Robin Mochel! And she ruined the party with her hyperactive antics, which included putting shaving cream on my cake. And even at nine, I sort of knew it was a sin to waste good cake.
Someone had given me a Rocker Barbie. She came with a tape of her band Barbie & the Rockers. Of course. They sang songs like “Dressin’ Up!” about how when “[they're] in glitter, [they] really shine” as well as an eponymous title track.
We blasted this tape.
We also played darts. And I threw a dart into my mother’s leg.
Eighth Grade Shame
Shawna lived down the street from me about a year before. She was funny as hell and really overweight. Shawna was a nice girl who was just too quirky to make it into the inner sanctum of the clique. And really, so was I. But we had money and I gave really good birthday gifts.
Shawna invited a bunch of us to her house for her birthday. And I know many of us didn’t want to go or thought it might be weird. But we all went and it was by far the best slumber party I ever went to. And why? Because Shawna’s mom fed us a steady diet of chicken nuggets and let us watch the V.C. Andrews classic Flowers in the Attic.
When my birthday came around two months later, I didn’t invite her. And I really have no idea why.
Other Party
I had a bunch of people over for some reason and my mom came to tuck us in. She would speed-recite the “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” prayer for each girl, but when she came to my friend Sarinya, a That Buddhist, she asked “Is your god Buddha?” Sarinya nodded. And my mom said, “Well, Buddha will watch you too!”
I think it might have been during this party that we watched a movie called “Hunk” about a nerd who sells his soul to the devil to become a lady-killer. The lead character, now a hunk, actually calls himself Hunk Golden. If you can find this movie, watch it. It is terrible.
The Co-Ed Slumber Party Disaster
Sarinya and her brother Smith had a co-ed party the year we were in the eighth grade. My parents thought this was weird, but let me go anyway. It was basically an excuse for Smith to make out with and feel up his girlfriend Trisha. I think some other people made out, too. But since I had no make out parter, I watched The Seventh Sign. In the morning, their mom made us breakfast. We got one pancake and one sausage link apiece. I went home and had a second breakfast.
It would be neat to have a grown-up slumber party. I think it could be hilarious, a great bonding experience. But are we past sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags? Couldn’t we all tough it out for a night so we could relax, paint each others’ toenails, talk about boys, and eat too much candy?
I vote yes.
9 comments9 Comments so far
about three years ago i had an adult slumber party. we went to chuck e. cheese’s and ate pizza and drank beers and played games. then we went to my studio and had the slumber party part. one friend drank room temp vodka straight. it was fun – totally do this!!!!
Yes to slumber party!!!!!!!!!!
That sounds like alot of fun! Can I paint your toenails?
I have seen “Hunk”, I’m very sad to say. very very sad.
You have? Really!!
I’ve been to grown-up slumber parties before and while they can be weird (because they are inevitably for some guy and girl to hook up…or maybe some other combination) the ones I have been to have been really fun. Of course, this was in college when everything was said to be “perfectly normal.”
Did anyone else ever go to “lock-ins?” If it was a co-ed slumber party parents would look at us strange, but if it was a lock-in it was perfectly acceptable.
what’s a lock-in?
Well that explains the prevalence of lock ins in Nashville, being on the Bible belt and all
I went to a lock-in in a sports center and one in a museum. To my knowledge, they were not church-sponsored.
In my experience, most adult slumber parties have happened because we try to pack too many people into one rented 70’s style condo at a 3rd rate ski resort. There might have be a little action in the back bedroom, with the couple who’s been together the longest earning the right to privacy, but for the rest of us, it invariably deteriorates into everyone screaming at the one guy who snores like a buzz saw, yet somehow sleeps through his own noise.