Cheap shrimp cocktail is worth a long drive. At least that's what my friends Jennie, Lisa and myself believe. About once a month the three of us pile into Jennie's Tahoe and make the trek downtown to Golden Gate casino-home of the 1.99 shrimp cocktail and the slowest valet inVegas. Jennie's AC in the Tahoe isn't functioning at its best and with temperatures peaking at 108 degrees today, the topic of sweat came up. How? By me exclaiming in disgust "I'm sweating between my breastesses! Gross!" This lead my other companions to proclaim that they too were sweating from various crevices. Sweating crevices. Just another charming part of Las Vegas summers. It gets so that you don't even wrinkle your nose at fat-guys sweaty back in the summer. Sweat in Vegas is no sweat.
Funny how things change...
I remember being in Jr. High and High School, fighting the raging hormones of adolescence and one of the many humiliating issues was what I now refer to as "weeping underarm syndrome." See, the teenage years can be a confusing time for most. Hair starts sprouting in the most absurd places. Acne sprinkles your face and oil oozes from your rapidly enlarging nose-pores. On top of all this nonsense (or because of all this nonsense) you're experiencing feelings and emotions that are foreign to you. You can't cry because you're too old for it, and while the occasional breakdown does still occur for the most part you swallow your feelings until they form a good, solid growth somewhere in your endocrine system. Thus, you're armpits cry the tears your pride has stifled.* Me, being a sensitive pisces well, my armpits...wept. A lot. Mortified by this new development, I was forced to wear sweaters and jackets on hot days when crammed into a classroom with others who for some reason did not suffer the same ailment. Wistfully, I stared at the bone-dry pits of my peers wondering why their armpits didn't weep. Was it because they had dates to the Prom or Homecoming Dance? Was it because they had the new No Fear shirt and Adidas Phantoms? Maybe it was because their body wasn't torturing them with the acne and the pubes and the nasal petrolium factory. Why was I so cursed? My curse was lifted only when I discovered tank-tops and no longer had to deal with the chilly damp sweat rings that formed when wearing a shirt with sleeves. An appalling development for my mother who would have had me wear a turtleneck snowsuit in June rather than show an inch of skin, but too bad. I was sweat free at last! Eventually, my hormones balanced out and I learned to cry anytime anywhere anytime I felt like it. Miraculously, I was freed from weeping underarm syndrome.
So many years I went without a relapse...of course I had to move to Vegas. But you know? When its hot outside and there is no AC you sweat, but you sweat with friends.
And that, dear readers makes all the difference. For now it is sweat, and not the repressed tears of an insecure teenager.
*No medical evidence whatsoever supports this.
