“Okay, no Vodo, no bitchy, none of that,” Vodo said as he sat down in the booth across from me, pointing a finger in my direction. “He’s new, this is his first Grumpy’s experience. Be nice.” The he, that Vodo was referring to, was one of his new, adorable acolytes. Incidentally, many of Vodo’s acolytes look just like him. Weird.

With the lecture portion of the night over, I thought for sure the entire night would be a buzzkill.

Despite the bumpy start, we laughed our asses off. We laughed and sang so loud that my throat hurt until Saturday. It was like a time-warp back to a very special 1994 of my mind. Seriously. I think The Hottie started it all off by busting out the Pearl Jam, and it just devolved from there. At one point I was sitting in a chair next to Vodo and Kelly shouting along to Alanis Morisette’s “You Oughta Know.”

It was perfect considering I had been doing my best all term to go back to being 22. For one night, I was right back there. It was the beer, the dark bar, and the semi-drunken sing-a-longs that put me back there. There’s something about strangers raising their voices together in song (even if it is the Crash Test Dummies’ “MmmMMMmmMMM”) that makes me schmoopy and nostalgic. Good music and friends always turns me into this sappy mother hen creature.

And, despite his pleas for no bitchy, Vodo was way bitchier than I was. Granted, I did come up with the nickname Baby Baryshnikov for an over-emoting karaoke singer. But the Vodo was responsible for naming one group of Button-upped, Blackberry Sporting White Collars “Middle Management” and then calling the pelvic-thrusting, Miami-Vice bearded, sideways Baseball Cap wearing guy K-Fed. See? That’s totally bitchy. I was so proud.

We were in rare form. When Middle Management got up and sang some Stone Temple Pilots’s song, he turned to me and said, “Do you remember when we use to play this song all the time at the frat house?”

“This one goes out to all my homies in Accounting,” I responded.

At one point Kelly said she couldn’t even hear herself sing because we were gabbing so loudly.

Of course, his crowning moment came when I asked him what the hell showtune one of my classmates had sung.
“It’s ‘Whatever Lola Wants’ from Damn Yankees,” he said.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I’m part gay.”

I nearly fell off my chair from laughing so hard.

I have to admit we were both part gay that night. I fell hard for The Wanderer, this curvy brunette who kicked all our asses when she took the mic in her hand. She fucking blew away, and I’m not just saying that because she sang “Get Off My Cloud” a mere minutes after I told Vodo it was my 2nd favorite Stones song. The woman had pipes.

“I think I’m in love,” I said. When she got up to sing “The Wanderer.”
“I’m totally committed to her,” Vodo said.

The Sisterclub has this theory that if you hang out with someone and laugh at every single one of their jokes, it’s very clear that you missed them. This theory grew from the era in our lives when they all moved to Wisconsin and I stayed here. Jodi Hanson and I would go to Chippewa Falls to visit and they would laugh at every joke she made, everything she said.

“You must have really missed me,” she said. “Because I’m not being that funny.”

So now whenever we catch someone laughing it up we always ask, “Did you miss me?”

Using that as a barometer, it seems very clear to me that I missed the hell out of ol’ Vodo last week. And though he’d probably deny it with every breath he took, he missed me.

And it’s only because I had kind of missed and he was being so funny that I didn’t punch him in the head when he turned to me at like 2 in the morning and said, “Come on Middle Management, we’re all leaving.”