FLASHBACK FRIDAY - Strange and Wonderful Friends .. The Girls

Continuing the trip back in time to the halcyon days of the 70s ... here's a look at 2 of my loooong term friends and FUN women of that time.


Jae, me, Phyllis (fearless) and Glo

I love this picture.  These girls were so much a part of my life from a very early age.

Glo -short for Gloria - was my childhood best friend.  She lived across the street and her family was as different to mine as day is to night.  I was an only child with "older", very religious, parents.  We had a relatively quiet life.  Glo on the other hand had, what seemed like to me, herds of siblings....4 or 5 if I remember rightly.  Her house was always chaotic and loud. 

We were BFFs for sure.  Spending every weekend sleeping over, going to school together, riding our bikes and generally being kids.  Sleepovers used to drive my dad crazy....we would talk and giggle way into the night.  More than once he would threatened to, "break us up! Someone was sleeping on the couch!"  Unfulfilled threats.  He never did it and we never stopped giggling.  When I was just about to start high school my family moved but that didn't stop us being best friends.  We spent every weekend together.  When we were older - 16/17 - we started to go to a club just for teenagers called the Electric Eye.  Great place.  Black lights, psychedelic music and BOYS!  So much fun dancing and making out in the parking lot with that special guy (at least for that week) .. we had a blast.

Glo met her, at the time, love of her life there.  I remember at the local pool one afternoon, after she and David had been going 'steady' for months, she told me they had 'done it'!  I was so sheltered I drove her crazy for weeks wanting to find out every detail!  It took a lot longer for me to shake off my Christian roots and jump in - so to speak.

David was drafted not long after high school and sent to Viet Nam.  He didn't come back physically injured but he wasn't the same man afterwards.  They got married, bought a big red setter dog and moved into an apartment down the street from Jae and me.  It didn't last.  The war changed David too much.  Glo got a divorce and later married someone else and moved away from Atlanta.  I moved to the other side of the world and we lost touch....forever it seems.  I hope she's still happy.  I would so much love to see her again.

Glo, David and their big red dog.

I met Phyllis in high school.  I clearly remember being aware of her from the school girls lavatory.  She was always fussing with her hair and one day she just threw her brush across the room!  That enticed  me talk to her, "what's the matter?", and after that we became friends.  Phyllis was crazy about the Beatles and we would sit in her basement room and listen to them over and over and over again - blasting out through her little record player.  We both had fan posters all over our bedroom walls.  My Beatles posters, of course, held a second position to the Rolling Stones.  Mick Jagger always ruled my girlie fantasies!

We stayed good friends through the post high school years and then moved into our hippy like years together. I got drunk for the first time with Phyllis.  She had an older brother that bought a little bottle of rum for us...we drank it with coke in her room.  Yuck.  I remember singing and jumping on her bed and then puking my guts up for the rest of the night.  Haven't touched rum since.  I think I was with Phyllis when I first smoked pot as well!  Phyllis met Jae, they became good friends and eventually moved in to share the little Marlbrook 'castle'.



Fearless Phyllis



Phyllis earned the name 'Fearless' because she simply was unstoppable.  She had a wild brave streak that could be, at times, a bit scary.  But a lot of fun too.  Phyllis' fell in love with a great guy - Jerry.  He was the room mate of a boyfriend of mine.  They were a terrific couple.  And, of course, they moved in across the street from Jae and me on Marlbrook.

Lovely couple!

The day Phyllis and Jerry left for Detroit.....not a happy day.

 

Jerry was from Detroit and he and Phyllis moved up there to be closer to his family and find work.  Not long after they moved Jerry was killed in a horrible factory accident.  Jae and I flew up to Detroit to be with Phyllis and stayed with the family until the funeral.  God that was an awful time.  Phyllis married again much later .. he died too from MS.  For such an infectious and fun loving woman she's had a rough rough life.  I saw her late last year in Atlanta.  Right now she seems to have found solace in religion.  I sincerely hope she finds peace and love again very soon.

That's just two of the girls to women I've had the fortune to share my life with.  There are so many more great women I haven't even begun to mention yet!!!   And so many more stories! 

We had good and bad times together and it's fun looking back.  If we all had a crystal ball back then to tell us where we would be today and how we would change, grow up to be so much older and find personal growth plus happiness as well as suffer loss and hardship ....  Would we have changed a thing?  Maybe some things - certainly no one would have chosen to lose Jerry - other things...I think not.

More flashbacks next Friday.

A particularly ugly morning after.

The girls - and our friend Ellen - helping Phyllis move into her apartment across the street.

Jae, Jerry, me, Phyllis and our friend Amy in the little kitchette at Marlbrook.  Happy times.