Hobson's Choice
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Dayton, OH
The Big Event of the year is almost upon us, the Appalachian Studies conference; we were at a reading tonight by Jeff Mann, and afterwards people were calling across the aisles, making plans to meet up in Dayton at the conference.
Dayton, Ohio.
For me, it's a glamourous city, only seen by moonlight and mercury vapor of streetlights. When I was in high school, the french club made an annual trip to a dinner theater in Dayton. Looking back at myself then, I feel fondly foolish about what a high culture experience I thought it was at the time, how I thought my life outside Rising Sun after high school would be just like going to the dinner theater all the time.
We got to eat from a gorgeous buffet, where a server in a white toque sliced the roast beef to your taste, and everyone had to sample the beer-battered fish. This was in the day before Golden Corral. We thought we were eating big city food.
For me, the pleasure was in seeing the play, the rush and thrill of live performance. For the other kids, the thrills were two-fold. They got to order "virgin" cocktails; everyone had enormous blue girl drinks with a million straws and umbrellas. And on the way home, late at hight and almost two hours, the kids with boyfriends or girlfriends made out while the rest of us slept.
So inexperienced, I remember not quite understanding why they wanted to make out so much on the bus in front of other people. In my imagination, I thought that they had plenty of opportunties for love all the time, like the boy who kept his girlfriend shoved up against my locker during every passing period between classes. I realize now that they had so little time, so few opportunities for darkness, so few extended moments without parents and adults intruding. How magical that distance between Dayton and Rising Sun must have seemed, even more so than the songs in Camelot or Hello Dolly that we'd heard live that night.
9:13 p.m. - 2006-03-02
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