When I was in nursing school, living in Lawrenceville with Kat, and accepting beer as payment for utilities, I regularly drank at the Thunderbird for many, many hours many, many nights week. We’d have “Hot Bitches Mondays” when Kat, Robin, and I would get “dressed up” and go to the bar without the boys. Looking back, that is a ridiculously inaccurate statement because our version of “dressed up” was essentially to brush our hair and wear our good jeans, but there we’d be. Crowded around a touch screen machine playing naked photo hunt. Girls, not guys, because the pattern was usually ‘boobs, vagene, hair, earring, dog’. I loved when they would just remove that big white dog’s eye, or make his tongue really long. When you play the erotic guys, it’s usually a sweaty dude playing basketball, and that’s not really naked at all, now is it?
Sometimes, we’d vary our venue and venture to Gooskis or the Vets club, Belvediere’s or the gay/lesbian bar on Polish Hill that’ s closed now, but the night always started or ended at the Thunderbird. It was Kat’s bar, her bar family, and I felt a little guilty for assuming it could be mine as well, but Kat being who she is, I was welcomed with open arms. I was surrounded by all these off beat, funky, smart, interesting people who were as interested in getting to know me as I was to get to know them. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could just be me. I didn’t have to explain anything, I didn’t have to be a pushover and go where everyone wanted to go when they wanted to go there. I had a friend and ally in Kat because we balanced each other perfectly and we both were trying to make it through nursing school with our sanity (but not our livers) intact.
I have ridiculous memories of that time. Passing out and falling down the stairs at our Davison house and Kat making me waffles after escorting me back to bed with instructions not to get out alone. Passing out at Gooskis in that puddle of water/beer, Hobby picking Robin and me up and Robin insisting that I’d pissed myself. Robin pretending to be my girlfriend so that I was more comfortable at the lesbian bar. When Kat skipped school and made me spaghetti and garlic bread for birthday dinner, and Hobby and Robin brought over boxed wine and a princess crown.
This was when I had my very first I-no-longer-live-with-my-parents party. It was a hot ass summer Friday, Kat and I had just each spent an entire day at clinical and, after being awake and sweating since 5 am, I remember sitting on our porch, looking at the keg and wondering if it would be rude to cancel. This was the first meeting of all of our various groups of friends, and I was excited. After all, I had found all these amazing new people, and if I thought they were awesome, surely my old friends would, too? Well, no go. I was accused of being a bad hostess because I didn’t devote enough time to talking to my old friends, and this became the catalyst that led me to cut a lot of old friends out of my life. The tension that I was starting to feel when I was with them was horrible in relation to the happiness I felt when I was with my new friends, and it was an easy decision to make. It’s not hard to cut out the people that are holding you back, at a certain point, you can actually feel yourself being pulled in two directions. I didn’t have enough of me for everyone and school. I let a part go. And I never regretted it.
Last night, I went to the Thunderbird and see Shawn & Hobby preform. I remember when the hosted open mic night, every Wednesday, both working multiple jobs at that time to pay the rent while chasing their musical dreams. I remember drinking at the bar on a Saturday afternoon while Kat worked and they practiced and recorded their first album on the upstairs stage. I remember when I heard they were moving to Nashville, and that final show before they left. I remember when I realized that they were making it on their own talents, and I remember how happy I was to attend their first return show at the Thunderbird.
It is very odd to sit in a bar that you feel you were fated to walk into (the only address visible on the mural painted on the wall behind the stage is 516 – my birthday, which was always some sort of sign to me) and listen to music and songs I’d first heard 5 years ago, sung by the voices of boys who I once knew very well. Who came up to me last night with big smiles and hugs. Who promised to mail me a shirt because they didn’t have a red one in my size. Who hugged me goodbye as if they had been really glad to see me, and who put on an awesomely fatastic show.
We all once lived in this bubble that was 2005 at the Thunderbird, but now most of us have moved on. Kat, Jake, and Robin are all out in California. I bought my Shadyside condo and stopped being a Lawrenceville bar rat. Shawn and Hobby moved to Nashville and made it doing what they’d always wanted. But, in some small way, we all still have that part in us. It is the spot where we all reunite whenever any of them comes back through town. It’s the place where I met them all, the place that was home base for so long.
Last night, in some weird way, was like going home again. Only, you know, I can’t drink til 4 am anymore and was drinking Michelob Ultras instead of chugging shots of Rumplemintze and Jager bombs between the Miller Lights. And I didn’t park my car halfway on the sidewalk when I got home.
It was evident how much had changed. But it was also evident how much hadn’t. And that is why last night was amazing.
