A Poor Excuse for Vice Ridden

This picture is a poster from California illustrating Shoulder Taps, a project where teens hang out in the parking lot in front of a liquor store, with an ABC officer out of sight, and see if they can get adults to agree to buy beer for them This is one of the things I was doing with the teens I work with last weekend. I am currently the adult advisor for Teens In Action (a group of high school students who work to reduce underage drinking ) in Juneau and the administrative coordinator for the three TIA groups in the region. .

And sometimes I feel like a bit of a misfit. The non-profit which serves as the umbrella for my grants, as well as a number of alcohol and tobacco prevention grants, is mostly staffed by people in recovery. Which would qualify me if I were with TATU (Teens Against Tobacco Use), since I'm an ex-smoker. But, I'm not an ex-drinker. I hardly ever qualified as a current drinker.

I come from a family of people who don't bother to be tee totalers because we forget to drink. I once was having dinner at a Greek restaurant and decided that a glass of retsina* would go well with my meal, and realized that was the first time I'd had a drink in over 20 years. Not because I'd resisted the desire, but because I hadn't had the desire. I don't usually think of having alcohol any more than I would think of drinking butter. No virtue to it, just lack of interest.

Where other TIA leaders have been able to warn the teens of the perils of booze by telling about their own humiliating experiences, I've only been drunk three times, all one winter when I was living in Fairbanks, and if I told the kids about it they would laugh. Once I got up on the bar and led all of the patrons and servers in a round of children's songs. I was working as a Montessori teacher at the time, so we sang things like "I've got two eyes, they're both the same size" and "Where is thumbkin" and "It's not easy being green." Once I woke up my eight and six year old children and led them and my two roommates in a game of follow the leader over the dressers and under the beds. Once I was out with a gay French Canadian chef and we spent the evening picking out likely men for each other. And then, because the streets were icy and I was having trouble walking, I locked my knees and he pushed me home while I sang "Here we go loop de loo."**

Now none of that is very dignified. But I'm afraid to share it with the teens for fear they'll think it proves that alcohol isn't all that bad. Actually, when I was a hippy I was hardly any more into drugs than I've been into alcohol. I thought I was living a pretty decadent life, but partly that was because I was contrasting it with the complete small town respectability I had been raised with. And, as wicked as I got, the times soon caught up with and merrily passed me by.

* And you are undoubtedly thinking that retsina is an acquired taste, and how could someone who seldom drinks acquire it? Well, I like the taste and did the very first sip I took.

** My friend Joyce Zimmerschied was one of the roommates for follow the leader, Linda McKinney was with me when I got pushed down the icy street. So, of course, one day decades after these events, the three of us got together and they sat around regaling my children and each other with tales of when I got drunk!