My 16th Birthday!

I was driving home from work today - listening to my favorite radio station (WZZR Real Radio - 94.3 fm). It's a talk radio station, so no music, just people calling up all day to talk about stuff that is on their mind. The Love Drs are my favorite hosts from 10am - 3pm and I get to sneak a listen at work (Shh). On the drive home it's the home team with Josh Cohan, who is horrid but it's better than music radio! Anyway - today they were asking people to call in and tell stories of things that happened to them that they tried to cover up. This reminded me of a story.......

During the time leading up to my 16th birthday I was still living at my mom's house in Glasgow, Scotland! I was at that stage of trying to impress my peers and decided I should have a house party. Now back in those days, and probably still now, there were "gangs" in our neighborhoods. I'm not talking about the "Bloods" or the "Crips" but still there were factions of people that didn't get along with each other. I remember I had a boyfriend, slightly older, that I used to walk to his neighborhood to see him and I always felt safe because people knew who I was dating. Anyway, I invited a bunch of people to my party and my mom agreed to go out and stay at a friends that night as long as my sister Shona was going to look out for me.

The party began well but very quickly got nasty. I kept running into people I didn't know, who were asking who's party it was. :) My poor sister was running around like a crazy person trying to stop people from stealing her clothes! She had a lot of designer stuff that kept getting put up other peoples tops - a la shoplifting.

Needless to say amongst the people there were people from opposing "gangs". One group boarded themselves into my mom's bedroom, on the second floor, using my mom's armoire against the door. The people from the other group went into the the bedroom next door, that had bay windows, and tried to get into my mom's room through the window. Remember - this was on the 2nd floor!!! By this time my sister had had enough and had called the police. When they came they threw everyone out and at that point we discovered that all the kitchen knives had been stolen. I couldn't stop thinking what a huge success my party had been. Just think of how people would be talking about MY party for months to come!!!!

The next morning I woke up and realized I had slept on the living room floor (I'm pretty sure I wasn't drinking coca cola back then either). The house was a disaster. There was blood sprayed up the walls in the hall and people had graffiti-ed the walls too :(. My sister was right there for me even back then. She wanted to kill me but helped me make a plan. My mom was coming home within hours and we needed to to get the house back in order. Shona sent me off to the home improvement store to buy paint to paint over the blood etc. I took a sample color and ran off to the store, came back and painted over the blood splattered areas of the walls (not the whole wall though). We barely got the house back to normal when my mom came home. Everything looked great..... until she asked what was different with the walls. We took a closer look and realized my mistake.......... our walls were satin paint but I had bought and touched up patches using gloss!

We were so close. We had a lot of explaining to do.....................