As seniors in high school, most school’s allow what is called a Senior Skip Day: a day when all seniors have an excused absence from school where they can spend time together at the park, a local museum, volunteering in the local community or – as most of us did – day drinking. For my senior class, our planned excursion was pretty easy to put together. Claiming at least partial ownership of an entire sub-division of houses on Grand Lake, my friend Dave had invited our entire senior class to spend a day and night partying at his place. Maybe everyone partied like we did in High School, but most of my friends in college were astounded by the parties we put on. From about 6:30 AM on Friday when we departed for the lake in a fleet of BMW’s, Range Rovers and 7 ft. tall Jeeps (yes, school started at 8:05 and most of us arrived late on a daily basis, but given the promise of a day of drinking, we managed to wrestle together 70 odd 18 year old hooligans into a 18 car caravan at 6:30 AM) until approximately 2 PM on Sunday afternoon, we spent doing our best to rid our brains of any of the knowledge we had acquired during our 13 years of private school education.
Thousands of beers, dozens of handles of cheap vodka, trash cans full of barely diluted everclear and kool-aid. There was a room dedicated to playing Asshole and Sloppy Die (our drinking games of choice at the time), there was a room for playing pool, a room for Dirty Jenga (where each tile had a “task” that had to be performed to another person in the circle – Dave wrote “make out with Dave” on about half of the tiles, which he found out later, was not the best idea he’s ever had. There were rooms for hooking up, a rave room with blacklights and neon beer signs. There was a hot-tub, a boat dock with a helipad for late night diving, a beer pong table and a stripper pole. We spared no expense (as we were still on our parent’s allowance) and drank more than we would likely ever drink again.
Then to make things more interesting, we filmed the entire night. Each person taking turns with the video camera doing Blaire Witch-esque self-interviews as well as each person documenting the things they found particularly entertaining about the evening. And in a way to relive our amazing time, we all met at Dave’s real house several weeks later to watch the whole thing in his theater room. Drinking, of course.
Then, I remember (barely), in college for my birthday one year, we rented a 40 passenger disco painted school bus driven by a guy with a ginger afro and a grateful dead t-shirt. Me, my parents and my 35 closest friends (and a couple pledge slaves from the fraternity where I was a sweetheart) then bought 15 or so coolers full of beer, dressed our pledges up as Mexican lawn mowers and drove the hour or so drive down to Salt Lick BBQ in Sweetwater, Texas. The bring your own beer BBQ joint where you waited for an hour even with a reservation you had to make at least 2 months in advance. We finished our beers before getting seated, had to buy some bottles of moonshine off some hillbillies in a pick-up truck then spend the next 5 hours drinking ourselves into oblivion on a wooden dance floor in the middle of nowhere USA. We two-stepped, shot-gunned, beer bonged, stuffed our face with pie and headed back to Austin in time to peruse 6th Street for a couple hours, hit the fraternity late night party and make it to a strip club.
I woke up the next morning on the lawn of the fraternity house, covered in one of the Mexican lawn mower ponchos next to one of my good guy friends and a stripper with a giant penis drawn on my arm (by my own hand and very anatomically correct, I might add) being poked by my dad who had crashed on the couch and who was now trying to figure out how to get either back to the hotel or to the nearest place selling pancakes.
I have spent a large portion of my younger years partying. Be it in high school at the lake, at a theme party or down by the river, in Mexico for spring breaks for cancun holidays, in college at the many frat parties, late nights or just on 6th street, and even post college with the girls in Hollywood, on 2nd street in the LBC or bar hopping around Brooklyn. Probably a few too many nights.
My track record aside, no amount of previous experiences, or actual training, could have ever prepared me for the debauchery, the madness, the insane sloppiness that is The Yacht Week.
