Hello there! My name is Andrea, but Kris calls me Drayuh—always has and probably always will. ? My little corner of the blogging world is over at https://dirtroaddoodles.com/
We’re both doing this 52-week blogging challenge, and this week’s prompt was to have a guest blogger, so we are swapping for the week. Kris told me I could write about anything, and readers, that is a dangerous game. But I will do my best to keep this brief and PG and not traumatize any of our children that might stumble upon our blogs.
We met in college in the fall of 1987 on 5th floor West of McMindes Hall. There’s no getting around it—we stuck out like sore thumbs amongst the other 5W residents. They were there to join sororities as fast as humanly possible. We were not. It has been 37 years and I still shudder at the thought.
On the weekends, starting after class on Fridays, Kris and I had the entire dormitory almost to ourselves. I don’t mean just the hall we lived on—I mean the entire building was almost deserted. We were left to our own devices to stay entertained.
Dorm life was a little different back then. Every room did not have a gaming system or a TV. There was ONE television (but it was a BIG one) in the whole damn dormitory. I don’t even know how I found out about MTV’s Headbangers Ball—probably from Kris, because I sure never saw it before college. It came on every Saturday night and we were there for it. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds—we had to make sure we had the TV. There were 2 or 3 other girls who would sometimes stay over the weekend, and they knew we wanted that TV Saturday night. So they would get to the lounge first and camp out on the couches watching some stupid girly chick flicks. Kris and I plopped down and became increasingly loud and annoying until the other girls gave up and left; after the first attempted coup, we made sure we got to the lounge a couple hours early. Then began several hours of headbanging heaven when MTV played great music. I don’t know what Kris had in her cup, but I always had a trusty can of Pepsi to stay hydrated. We made up our own arm movements to Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”—I still do it when the song comes on. We watched David Lee Roth and Axl Rose and Bret Michaels and all of the 80s hair bands gyrate and scream and wail on drums and guitars.
So that covered the Saturday night entertainment, but we also kept ourselves entertained the rest of the weekend. Our hall was a ghost town, so we could leave our room doors open and come and go as we pleased. We were broke college kids, so we took advantage of the Domino’s Pizza $5 large 2-topping pizza special. We’d order a mushroom and beef or a mushroom and black olive pizza and grab it from the delivery driver at the main entrance in 30 minutes or less. We sat in the hallway and ate our pizza and drank our pop and played game after game of Backgammon. I know Kris had a lot of keys and keyrings on one keyring, because she threw that huge wad of metal at me more than once in good-natured fun—I had never played Backgammon until I met her, but I had great beginner’s luck. The rest of the weekend would be spent calling our friends in different dorms, drawing, pouring over music magazines, collecting signatures on petitions, and watching all of the people moving around campus—5th floor was WAY up there and you could see everywhere.
Around 5 PM Sunday night, everyone would trickle back in. Parents would drop kids off in the circle loop, or kids would drive around in circles waiting for a parking spot to open up. The dorm cafeteria would finally open back up so we didn’t have to live off of leftover pizza and whatever else we could fit in our mini fridges. Five days later, we would do it all over again.
Good times, indeed.
ROCK -n-ROLL FOREVER!
