Guess Who's Old Today...

    Well, so much for that whole being cool like James Woods thing.  Amanda (aka: Miss Trickster) has turned twenty one today.  So, I hate to break it to you, guys, but if you get on her bad side now, you can no longer find safe refuge in a tavern.  She will track you down and beat you silly, and you've got nowhere to run and hide.  Your best bet is to rent a car and take the first fast road out of town.    

     Twenty-one years old, huh?  Gadzooks!  I barely remember my twenty-first birthday way back in 1989.  The funny thing is, I'd been going to bars long before I turned twenty-one, so it wasn't much of a big deal.  In fact, when I was ten, my first little league baseball coach was also the owner of the most popular bar in town --a place called Nearly Normal.  And, when other teams won their games, they'd go to Shakey's for pizza, but we'd all go hang out in an air-conditioned tavern to drink cokes, eat pizza, and play pool.  We were the envy of the league.

     As I was growing up, the drinking age was always eighteen-years old; however, shortly before turning eighteen, they upped it to nineteen.  I didn't particularly mind, but I had friends who had managed to make it to eighteen before they raised it, and suddenly, they just sort of disappeared. 

     The frustrating part came when I was zeroing in on the age of nineteen, and they decided to finally bump the drinking age up to 21. 

    On the other hand, there was simply so much confusion in Wisconsin in those days as a result of no one really knowing what the legal drinking age actually was that if you were anywhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, you rarely had a problem. 

    Anyway, Happy Birthday Amanda!  I think you should go buy a six-pack (or a forty) for no other reason than the fact that you can.  Whip out that shiny new driver's license and say "Ha!"

-DP