The Slightly Buzzed Beach Day-trip Nap
OK, my editorials are longer than the article...apropos of a beach-related post, did TND just jump the shark?
Not sure I’ve been this excited about a Featured Guest Friday since we launched it a few weeks back!1
Today’s post is brought to you by Brooke Everett, a friend of nearly 30 years, even longer than I’ve been friends with Henrietta and Evan!.2 Brooke and I met in the mid-90s through Mensa:3 specifically, the member-run Delaware Valley (Del Val) Mensa community.4 Circa 1997, Brooke launched the “Young Mensans”5 group a la Jerry Maguire, which also came out that year. I learned of this in a physical, tangible newsletter that I received in the mail (back when physical, tangible newsletters and mail were a thing) and replied to it, Dorothy Boyd/Renee Zellwegger style.6 To the best of my recollection, we were the only two members, and the club did not survive, but the friendship did — and the rest, as they say, is history!
We’ve stayed in touch off and on over the years, exchanging food-related tips and seeing some concerts together in our teens,7 socializing in our 20s and 30s when we both lived in Philly (see pic below), and most recently catching up over the past few months in our 40s, where the idea of this #FGF post came to be.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, and I hope this isn’t the last that we hear from Brooke or our other female readers!
After springing out of bed on a sparkling summer morning and zipping down the ACE8 over a quick 75-minutes, you and your bestie are fully set up on the beach. The first order of business is pouring High Noons9 into your Yetis, filled with ice at home that morning. You pound 2 of them, you chat, you talk shit, you share a bag of cool ranch Doritos,10 you laugh, you point out cute bathing suits on other women, you bemoan the fact that the group of bros a few umbrellas over is blasting awful music,11 and you gingerly shimmy in and out of the still-too-cold Atlantic. You are relaxed to the max.
Your head feels heavy, you click back your Tommy Bahama beach chair to recline a smidge more, and you give in to the sweet, gentle tug of Hypnos’s inevitable spell. You remain semi lucid, but after what only seems like a few minutes, the once comforting blanket of the sun’s warmth becomes too hot, your head bobs abruptly, and the sound of bloody murder emanating from the tiny asshole throwing sand nearby jerks you awake. Your friend says you passed out for a full hour. You laugh; this is exactly what you wanted out of today.
It’s time to head to Margate Dairy Bar & Burger for a perfect smash burger, sweet potato waffle fries, and a ½ Pepsi, ½ root beer from the soda fountain.12 You love summer. You could do this every day.
Ed.: To be fair, I’m always excited about #FGF — so no offense to our guest author, but I’ll probably be more excited about next week’s #FGF come next week, then the one after the week after, and so on, and so on…but hey, let’s just enjoy the “now” and my present levels of excitement, which are extremely high.
Ed.: TND is breaking new ground today with the first post from one of our female readers! And hopefully not our last — the Wife, SLF, I’m looking in your direction…
Ed.: I joined Mensa at the suggestion of “Uncle Jay,” a family friend, himself a Mensan who convinced my parents it would look good on college admissions applications. At this point, I can’t say whether it did — as a friend and former colleague reminded me over a decade ago, you can’t prove a negative. Regardless, I’m all right ‘cause I got a degree.
Also sorry if this seems like a #humblebrag — it is what it is (and do Mensans really brag about being Mensans?). Also, I was the least intelligent person I met through Mensa. OK, now it’s a #humblebrag.
Ed.: Fun fact: the Delaware Valley is freaking huge. Brooke is from Birchrunville, “an unincorporated community, little more than a woodland crossroads in West Vincent Township in northern Chester County, Pennsylvania,” per Wikipedia (too bad Substack won’t let me footnote a footnote to include the cite). I’m from Richboro, “a census-designated place (CDP) in Northampton Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, United States,” per Wikipedia, that’s like 42 miles away.
I love Pennsylvania, especially for its weirdly literal and unnecessarily cumbersome ways of describing places that you’d call “towns” or “cities” in most normal states…then again, as I’ve noted before, Pennsylvania is a commonwealth, so maybe it’s a commonwealth thing? But I digress…
Ed.: This is Brooke’s father’s best recollection re the name of the group — neither of us can remember it!
Ed.: She had me at “Young Mensans.”
Ed.: Third Eye Blind at the Electric Factory in 1998! To this day, “I took your stuff and put it in the basement when I found out what the smile on your face meant“ remains one of my favorite 90s pop lyrics!
ACE = Atlantic City Expressway. I know I have a word limit here!
Passion fruit is the superior flavor, obvz.
The beach is the only setting in which you eat Doritos. Truly.
This Tweet by @laylology is always my first thought in this exact scenario: “oh, you’re playing music at the beach?? you think your taste in music is superior to poseidon’s 24/7 ambient mixtape???”
I’m constantly puzzled as to why they don’t serve Coca-Cola products. I loathe Pepsi, so the mixture with the root beer here is key. I still want that sweet carbonation, but a full-on root beer feels aggressive.