Girls' night out

First, I drove a borrowed monster van full of our gals and two other adult leaders to The Big City. I think a special license should be required to drive that many seats. I had to be the brave James, being the eldest of the bunch and everybody's mom-away-from-home or anyway an aunt.

On the way up, we played count the cops and letter games, we sang schmaltzy Christmas carols, we called the local all-carols station and requested Alvin and the Chipmunks, and we were very silly.

We et at The Pie. Oh, man. We et ourselves sick. We et like Pie pigs. We should have been embarassed by how much and how hard we et, but we weren't. We figured we deserved as much comfort food as we could hold after reading what was enscribed on the bathroom stalls. Whoo!


We drove to the downtown library. We parked. We rode on the train. The free train, not the Peace Train. Big thrills! Teenage girls don't like to sit down on trains. They like to stand. They especially like to stand without holding onto anything. They like to do this whilst donning the most blasé facial expressions they can manage. If you call attention to their nonchalance it makes them laugh. If they laugh they lose their balance. But they still don't sit. Sometimes the adults think it's fun to stand as well, especially when they are awfully full of pizza and are counting on gravity to help with digestion, but they generally hold on. This is the point where I handed my camera to Kim for the night. She's taking photography in high school because all the other classes were full. She liked thinking that she shot me on the sly.


We hopped off downtown and saw the lights. Temple Square is crazy full of Christmasers, and we nearly got separated ninety and nine times, but amazingly we didn't lose even one of our sheep. We visited the Christus and Kim surrendered my camera long enough for a sister missionary who needed a tripod to get a group shot of us but anyhow here we are, just where we ought to be, right?


We watched a seven-minute movie that made me cry and then we saw somebody who used to live in our neighborhood whose kid lopped off most of my roses one afternoon whilst playing swashbuckler in my front yard and was thereupon chased down the street by an adrenaline-enhanced yours truly.

Temple Square was beautiful from every angle. Kim's angle (she was very proud of this one):


And mine (I like the interference, but not in any sort of symbolic way, so don't worry):


We caught the train back to the monster van and one of our sheep nearly got run over flinging herself into traffic. It's The Big City, you know. And we're from a flippin' sweet Hicktown.

I made good time on the way home, not quite so good as on the way up because it was quieter and my conscience didn't have to compete with Bing Crosby. It's easy to speed when you're driving a monster van, but I put off the natural man and defied my own genetically-inherited propensity for leadfooting down the freeway. I reminisced about experiences I've had over the years on I-15, but let's just say that's another topic for another day.