You did What to a Goat?! Getting’ Down at Playas, Record Breaking “Lengths” and Embarrassing More Family and Friends

After the excitement of “Taylorpalooza” at Auburn, we got a late start out of Alabama Thursday morning. And if you’ve been following our blog thus far, you already know the drill with our ability to judge distances- we told Lori’s cousin Willie at UNC that we’d be in Chapel Hill around 6pm. Psych! After navigating through Atlanta and the Carolina’s we rolled in somewhere around 10pm.

An exciting weekend, a big night in New Orleans, the party at Auburn and a long drive would not stop us from making the most of another night in a new place, especially with the knowledge that we were back east and our journey would be concluding in a mere two days.

After classy drinks on a rooftop bar with cousin Willie, he departed for an obligatory event with his frat’s pledges and we hit the town to continue the night. We wanted to go dancing, our favorite late-night pastime, and, to continue the classy kickoff to the night Willie had suggested a bar called “Playas.” Given our directional abilities, we did not find Playas and ended up at the end of the line of bars at a spot with hip-hop pumping and co-eds grinding. Left only to dance with each other, we grabbed drinks and hit the dance floor unashamed. After a few dances however, we decided the bartenders were the hottest catches in the bar and the music and crowd inhibited our getting to know them better. “On to Playas!” we decided.

We finally found it, and it was quite the scene. Again, we were the only two girls that hadn’t arrived with male dance partners, and since we were rocking the “I-just-spend-the-entire-day-in-a-stuffy-car-without-washing-or-even-brushing-my-hair-before-I-left-look” and were the only ones without short skirts and high heels it looked like it would stay that way. Not to be daunted, we got right to the middle of the stage and if nothing else, provided some entertainment for the paired up onlookers.

The night ended at what was supposed to be another “classy bar” where we sipped our nightcaps antisocially in the corner and, for whatever reason, spend the better part of half an hour fixated on the various shoe choices of the boys at the bar.

Willie kindly picked us up at last call and we enjoyed an amusing slumber party conversation that included joking about the rights of passage in a frat (think the uptight Omegas in Animal House on initiation night), speculation over the size of a certain male appendage among Tar Heel athletes and whether they might break the Guinness Book of World Records (when we checked the book the next day we discovered that it is PG-rated and therefore omits such categories), and realized it was a good thing no one had asked our names at any bar or on any dance floor in town because had we admitted that we were Willie’s guests we may have embarrassed him beyond social repair.

Leaving Our Legacy In Auburn - "Jessica has the runs upstairs"

When you put two wash-up college grads from small artsy fartsy liberal arts schools in the northeast into a sorority at Auburn University in Alabama, it is pretty much a given that things are going to get weird. And no, we were not going to disappoint. Quite honestly, it’s a miracle that we weren’t kicked out within the first few hours and we are willing to bet it’s a good thing that we spent just under 48 hours total in Auburn – any more might have meant death by sorority.

After being welcomed by Taylor, drinks (shocker there), and a tour of the school, we tried to be pretty tame. But alas, that can only last for so long. While waiting for Taylor in the lobby (we don’t know what else to call it) of her sorority house, we saw a whiteboard right next to the front desk. The little sorority sister who was supposed to be waiting at the desk had apparently had to step out for a few minutes. The sign read “Jessica had to run upstairs”. Really Jessica, really? She was setting herself up for humiliation and amusing us endlessly. This being said, naturally, Lizzy had the brilliant idea (within seconds of seeing the sign) to change around the words a bit to “Jessica has the runs upstairs”. Who knows, maybe no one else would laugh but we knew we would, even if it meant getting caught on camera and humiliated again (oh wait, no dignity left to lose so all was well).

We giggled, we chuckled and we went on our merry way to spend the afternoon with Taylor. We were overjoyed to see that Lizzy’s brilliant sign was still there hours later when we returned and even happier to find out that a) Jessica was a bitch and b) the girls in the sorority found it hilarious. We continued to prance around the house, mocking and posing for our own sorority headshots, mooning unsuspecting students, dressing like hobos, and acting like general idiots.

We found out just a few days ago (2 weeks after our sorority experience) that not only was the note on the board a hot topic of conversation, but that our new sorority sister friends have kept it alive. Apparently different girls in the sorority are having issues in the upstairs bathroom now on a daily basis and we think it’s safe to say that we left our legacy in Auburn. 

San Pedro's... No Wait, We Mean Pat Obrien's

As we drove out of New Orleans on Tuesday morning Lizzy asked “What was that place called, San Pedro’s?” referring to the piano bar we’d visited the night before. “I think it was called Pat O’Brien’s?” Lori thought aloud, checking to see if she still had the napkin from the bar, which had the recipe to their delicious, and deceptively strong Hurricanes written on it. Yea, it was Pat O’Brien’s, only like, the most famous bar in the French Quarter. Forgive us our cultural confusion, we were hadn’t yet recovered from the daze Austin City Limits had left on us, and we’d been spending a lot of time almost south of the border recently.

Thanks to the great company of Meg, Willie, and Mellow, we spent Monday night in the French Quarter, hanging out in Meg’s amazing apartment and seeing the best of what Monday night in New Orleans had to offer. Which was, eating gumbo, having the amazing discovery that open containers are totally okay on the streets of the French Quarter, dancing on Bourbon Street, seeing topless women, and almost getting Lori to do karaoke… New Orleans kept us up and up, pushing back any slump the post-Austin weekend could have otherwise imposed on us.

Girl Talk Video

Live on stage with Girl Talk !

Woodstock 2009 - Austin City Limits

We had heard of Austin City Limits - a massive three day music festival in Zilker Park in Austin, Texas. It sounded cool, we had high hopes of seeing some of our favorite musicians, but we had NO idea what to really expect or what we were getting ourselves into. Three days of live music, mud, and debauchery turned out to be yet another one of the highlights of our trip.

1 On Friday, day 1 of the festival, we had to make the embarrassing yet necessary decision to take a bike taxi to beat the crowds and make it to the concert in time to see K’naan perform (this was after a considerable amount of wine that led to the two of us wandering around the city and getting lost on our way). We finished off the night with Kings of Leon who gave a truly kick ass performance despite Lori being berated by some crazy girl about (yet again) nailing her in the face with her hair while dancing.

We woke up Saturday to pouring rain that turned out to be so relentless and so oppressive that in the course of a few hours, Zilker Park transformed into a mud pit that was oddly similar to Woodstock in the 60’s. I don’t think we saw as much acid-tripping and nudity but it was certainly a sight to see. After watching various artists perform throughout the day – Bon Iver, John Legend, Flogging Molly – and being literally drenched from head to toe, covered in mud, and barefoot, we decided that the best thing to do wasn’t to find some respite from the storm and the mud but to push to the front of the Livestrong Stage 2 hours before Dave Matthews Band would be performing in order to ensure a good spot. And that we did. We stood in the rain, next to the crazy drunk groupies who had been there for hours if not days (who for some reason, could not understand why we didn't want any of their mystery drink or shots of whiskey from their suspect flasks) without adequate clothes or an umbrella (or shoes for that matter because they would be sucked off by the mud when walking) for just short of 2 hours. When the band came on, it was worth every minute. DMB’s performance was absolutely unreal and ironically enough, they ended up closing with the two songs that we had been hoping to hear most. When we got back to our friend Andrew's apartment where we were shacking up for the weekend, we were so foul and covered in filth that running into his apartment straight to the bathroom to shower was not a possibility because we would have destroyed the place. We instead dropped trough, jumped in the pool, and came out feeling like we had been washed of all of our sins. I guess it was pretty Woodstock of us to be running around naked on a high after an awesome concert (though it was a natural high, not an LSD-induced trip - maybe some other time...)

Sunday came around and low and behold, the grounds were a mess. It didn’t matter though – we had gotten a good nights’ sleep, rethought our footgear (we were willing to wear and sacrifice sneakers and hiking boots for the sake of our safety/in order to not contract a disease from the mud), and were ready to go. After experiencing Passion Pit perform for the first time Sunday afternoon (and developing a new obsession), we knew that we had at least an hour until Girl Talk was supposed to get started. We figured what the hell, why not go to the front and push up as far as we could get? Dressed like fools in old lacrosse pinnies, sweatbands, high socks, mardis gras beads, a fake dreadlock and fanny packs, we trekked through the mud and joked about trying to get on stage. How exactly it happened, we will never know. But we thank our little hippie friend who we serendipitously ran into, chatted with, and who suggested that “yo girls, this is your chance, go for it” as people began jumping the gates and running behind stage with hopes of being one of the few who would make it up there. We took our guardian angels advice, Lizzy grabbed Lori’s hand, and we ran. And we made it. We ended up as one of the 30 or so people who were up on stage for the concert, and the hour and fifteen minutes that we spent up there was indescribable.

Dead sober, dressed like fools, and acting like our typical uninhibited borderline embarrassing selves, we literally and figuratively danced our pants off. Beyond just experiencing Girl Talk on stage, what was so unreal was the masses of people - as we looked out from stage, we saw a sea of literally thousands and thousands of heads. The farthest thing we could see in the distance were more and more flocks of fans. At the end of the day, I suppose our uncanny ability to be OK with how filthy we were (we are essentially hippies at heart), our perseverance and 'what the hell why not' attitude got us somewhere.

fk

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For Darren