So I didn’t do anything intellectually stimulating, cultural or artistic this week. I went to the club. Remember before your mid-30’s when you were 18 – 24 and going to the club was everything? I still remember my first time at the club. Cue flashback sequence. This leads to one of my favorite stories. It was my cousin’s 18^th birthday. I am three months older, so we needed to wait until her birthday to hit the club. My birthday consisted of a dinner. We had a slight disagreement about where to go. She wanted to go to UBQ’s, which had male dancers. I have another epic story about male strippers that will need to wait. I wanted to go to Legends because everyone on the radio made it seem to be the coolest place in the world and Monday was “College Night” or 18 and over night. This was a Monday. Score! But it was her birthday, so we went to UBQ’s. This was in the early days of MapQuest, when it was a software program and terrible. You would plug in your location and desired destination.  Then, print out the equivalent of a 5 year old’s line-drawn map that didn’t even give you cross streets.  Our younger brother (okay, he’s my cousin) swore with his 12 year old might that this was way better the traditional paper maps we used from AAA.

So we lied to our parents about where we were going. Detroit? By ourselves? On a weeknight? Lies were necessary. Her birthday fell in this weird week high school seniors got off between the last day of exams and graduation. However, non-seniors were still in school. We followed the directions on this MapQuest printout and…. We were in the middle of nowhere Detroit. This is when I learned a valuable lesson: Never Ask Detroiters (city dwellers, not suburbanites) for Driving Directions! I actually messed up and did this last year while looking for a post office. I saw and almost passed the real post office while following some alleged directions. Since I made it, dude was spared any ill thoughts.

Back to the 90’s, we asked the lady at the gas station if she knew where UBQ’s was. She claimed she did and we were sent to lovely Wyandotte.  This is when we called my cousin who should be in bed and asked him to go on the computer and figure out what went wrong. This was nearly disastrous as my uncle heard my cousin on the phone and wondered what he was up to and why he wasn’t in bed, of course. School night and not supposed to be in Detroit, remember?

My cousin gave us new MapQuest directions from our current location and we headed en route to not UBQ’s. This landed us downtown. UBQ’s was not in downtown Detroit. I knew this much from the radio ads. We decided to ask the street jackhammer guy if he knew where UBQ’s was. He claimed he did. We used his directions and ended up at Legends! That is where we went as it was almost midnight. On the way home, we just followed the masses, who led us to the freeway (or “eway” as it is called back home). We went westward home.

That experience was fun and exhilarating due to the fact we were 18. Getting lost for 90 minutes at this point in my life just to go to the club would leave me humorless and mad. We went to POV this previous weekend. This worked well as the theater crowd was leaving and I got the best parking spot. You wait indoors to get in, no shivering. You don’t have to pay and you get a show as this place draws an eclectic crowd. Apparently, there was some demented prom theme happening as we saw a lot of ladies in brightly colored, ruffled evening wear. Then, there were the touristy meemaws, who looked thoroughly confused as to why anyone would suggest this place to them. The preppy former frat boy and sorority girl K street types. An entire family unit of mom, dad, and two adult sons. The loud, arguing hoochie mamas with multiple wardrobe malfunctions. The occasional drunk girls, who must have pre-gamed as even basic drinks are $14.50 a pop so people are rarely drunk there. I noticed all of this because we were sitting in the hallway as my friend’s fabulous new shoes hurt.

Prior to that we went to 901 restaurant. The food was okay, the service was slow. But they had light up menus. I liked the light up menus. I have steered away from eating out so much lately as my waistline has been mad at me and I feel like I haven’t been missing much with my latest dining experiences. No more clubbing for the rest of the year!