My kind of Family....

Growing up in a small town I attended Catholic school.  If you live here in these parts going to Catholic school is more of the norm and not the exception.  In our town it was truly the opposite.  Consequently I sat next to the girl whose last name started a with a C, mine started with a D, for six years.

I left the Catholic school before anyone else in my class did.  It was traumatic.  I went to the Public Junior High School by myself and people actually asked me if I had just moved here - the towns population is approximately 8,000 and most are cousins.  Needless to say I was the lonely outcast for a couple of years. I digress.

Once in High School I reconnected with that girl whose last name started with the C, mine starting with a D, we were still seated next to each other.  That was really the first time that we had hung out together and I spent anytime at her house.  It was quickly apparent where she got her wicked sense of humor.  Her mother is hysterically funny.

They are that delightfully delicious funny that makes you not only pee your pants just a little, but makes you want to curl up on the couch and become a permanent fixture.  As teenagers we would walk into the local JC Penny store and my friend would run up to a mannequin and say, "Julia! Where have you been I haven't seen you for ages!" Making 50 something store clerks glare at us and whisper - "Drugs!"   They were the family that would attack each other, in a good way, I think.  Icing steps, greasing door handles, decorating the inside of cars and rooms and on occasion breaking into each others houses to pull off a rouse.  Like the time they rearranged the furniture while their parent were out for the night.

For years her mother drove around town with a large Barbie head, the kind you could do the hair on, sitting up in the back window like a passenger.  She would go to garage sales and purchase varies hats, headbands, and head ornaments for it.  Her mother also started a tradition at the annual festival's parade where she and her girlfriends would hunt all year for the ugliest prom dresses they could find and then they would sit along the parade route with tiara's  and sashes as the "Queens of the Parade".  Waving royally at all floats and real queens (those poor teenage girls really didn't get it) that passed before them.

Needless to say, that when I see an email from my friend pop up with an attachment I brace myself, and usually hit the bathroom first so as not to soil myself.  The latest was what my friends children did to their Uncle with the help of their Grandmother (surprised?) after he fell asleep on the floor after Thanksgiving dinner, really? I don't think I would have ever slept in that house.