This club had everything: bananas wearing fanny packs, the music of the late, great Aaliyah, hundreds of 20-somethings simultaneously singing along to Blink 182's What's My Age Again and crying because they used to think the song's 23 year old protagonist was SO OLD. (or was that just me crying?)
Before I could be among the hundreds of people jumping along to Bye Bye Bye, I had to decide what to wear.
It was a tough call: scrunchies, overalls, floppy Blossom hats, sunflowers -- the 90s had so much amazing fashion. But before I bought a pack of $5 scrunchies at Target (yes, they still sell them, and is it just me, or is that WAY too expensive for an extinct trend?), I realized I had the perfect outfit.
I'm a bit of a clothes hoarder, and stuffed behind a shirt from my trip to Israel in 2000, a Guster t-shirt, and the dress I was wearing when Y proposed, was the ONLY thing I could possibly wear to this event: the dress I wore to my bat mitzvah, purchased at The Limited Too in 1997.
If this dress could talk, it would tell you about how I invited my Girl Scout troop and my Sunday School class to my big bat mitzvah party at a hotel, and then begged them to invite anyone they knew, because they were my only friends.
It would tell you how all of these people slow danced along to the Spice Girls and Toni Braxton, while I played on the floor with my niece (it would be awhile -- like, 300 years in teenage girl time -- before anyone slow danced with me).
And it would tell you how one girl from my Girl Scout troop got to my party really, really early and we wandered around the hotel aimlessly -- a bonding experience that would be the beginning of a 15+ year friendship.
And then the dress would tell you how it was stuffed into a closet, doomed for obscurity, until the fateful day in 2013 when it became the perfect costume for a 28 year old acting like a 13 year old.
(girl power.)