Blog 1.1: Thirty Minutes and One Hundred Dollars

The fall of my junior year was a particularly mild season, filled with morning coffee and cigarettes on the steps of the Met and illicit walks through the park during lunch.  I spent my days engaged in high academia, challenging my intellect and shaping my morals through interpersonal relationships and experiences.  Afternoons were dedicated to extracurricular activities at school and later softball practices on Long Island.  I grew up pretty content in my relatively sheltered home, spending most of my time balancing my rigorous course load with sports under the expectation of my family that any free time would be spent working towards my goal of attending a prestigious university and playing Division I softball.  My nights, however, were soon to become a completely different story.

While other girls dreamt of sweet sixteens spent ice skating at Rockefeller Center or gorging themselves in an oversized ice cream sundae at Serendipity, I had only one goal in mind: to indulge in the reckless lifestyle of a young New Yorker.  I had always looked up to the upperclassmen who would cluster around the senior table in the basement of our Fifth Avenue mansion of a high school, poring over blurry pictures on digital cameras and recapping the events of the previous weekend between intermittent rages of laughter.  Their tales of debauchery seemed to be nothing but a pipe dream to me, a baby-faced fifteen year old with little pull in terms of getting parental permission to spend a night out on the town.  And then, one brisk night in late October 2004, everything changed.

After my birthday dinner at one of our favorite Mexican haunts, my best friends and I headed downtown into the uncharted waters of Greenwich Village, our eyes set on a sketchy basement clothing shop somewhere on MacDougal Street.  I looked both ways before entering the store, wondering what I would say if someone recognized me before being quickly ushered behind a rack of jackets and seated in a cold metal chair.  Thirty minutes and one hundred dollars later, I walked back out onto the street and lit a cigarette, exhaling a breath of smoke with a sigh of relief as we walked under the lights crosstown towards our next destination: Desmond’s Tavern.

Earlier in 2004, same-sex marriage had become legal in Massachusetts, a huge step in the country’s continuing battle towards equality and a bright moment for young liberals during the Bush administration.  The majority of my peers at the time were at the very least left wing leaning, though we functioned day in and day out under the strict law of an all-girls private Catholic establishment.  The administration did a very good job of monitoring the school-wide assemblies discussions, for the most part excluding LGBT issues from the board and making the legalization of same-sex marriage a hot topic of hushed discussion around school throughout the year.

My first successful trip to a legendary high school bar was one surrounded with a ton of emotion, much as the legalization inspired me and my borderline rebellious youth with whom I surrounded myself.  A nervous excitement mixed with the novelty of the respective situations, creating a sense of hope for the years to come as a thrilling adventure into unfamiliar territory had just begun.  The recognition of same-sex marriage was an affirmation in itself, as traditions were questioned and forward progress was made in our lives just as I “came of age” and began to learn more and more about the world that now lay at my fingertips.  These issues were a big deal to us at the time, as they both exemplified an acceptance into a new social circle that had been previously unattainable.