[At Right: Sonya, Christie and I, Spring Break 1993. We were all drunk as Cooter Brown, I assure you. Self-portrait by yours truly. I have always been gifted at turning the camera on myself and preserving the moment.]

So I get a call at seven-thirty this morning, just as I'm getting ready to tear myself away from some movie that had Reese Witherspoon playing a stripper. It was enthralling, but that's beside the point.

The phone call was from my friend Christie. Yesterday morning at 5:30 she had a baby. A baby! The same Christie whose hair I held when she puked over the balcony at my first apartment. The same Christie who once spent a night wrapped around my toilet. The one who basically talked me through college, one dirt-poor semester at a time. I've said it before and I'll say it again: she is a towering red-headed plateau on the landscape of my life.

And now she's a mama! How cool is that?

Since it seems to be turning into old home week here at wonderland 2, I think an embarassing yet amusing story is in order.

Picture it: September, 1990. The leafy green campus of the University of Central Arkansas. I had announced earlier in the day to a group of my friends that we would be getting drunk that night. Some of my friends (Christie included) had never drank before - imagine that! I was at my work study job that afternoon and a stream of people kept coming by to give me money. This made my boss - a withered old harridan - like me even less, if that was possible. Besides being a slacker who couldn't make it to work on time I was probably a drug dealer, snorting pot and shooting ecstacy and whatnot.

So that night we all piled into my friend Carrie's saffron-yellow Monte Carlo and headed for the thriving metropolis of Little Rock.

Things didn't go so well in Little Rock. Our friend Mookie had assured us that she had bought liquor and gone un-carded numerous times before. I'm sure this was true, but her feminine charms and mature demeanor failed her that night.

Almost.

We made one last stop at a liquor store on our way back to Conway. A raffish fellow was loitering outside. Mookie approached him. Words were exchanged. Mookie came back to the car a few moments later, triumphant, a clinking bag of goodies in her arms.

"I had to give him my phone number," she said, "ewwww!"

Back on campus we smuggled our contraband into Carrie's room, right under the watchful eye of her Pentacostal RA. We started drinking. I was hitting Seagram's Seven, one shot at a time. Everyone else was drinking Purple Passion, on my recommendation that it drank smooth and packed a hell of a wallop.

It was truer than I knew.

Midnight approached, the time when boys had to be out of the girl's dorms. The liquor was gone, and we all went for a walk. This is where things get fuzzy for me. I do remember we all went to pee behind a Subway near campus. At one point we hid in a grove of pine trees, sure that campus security was going to sweep down on us and cart us away. Sitting on the curb, Christie and I taking turns puking on my new white All-Stars. Sprawled on the steps of my dorm, drooling helplessly...

The next morning I woke up, profoundly ill, in a puddle of vomit on my bed. My shoes were pink. I talked to Christie later that day. Her shoes were pink, too.

So welcome to the world, Stephen Blake, and you mind your mama. You don't want her to raise hell when you're around. She's good at it.

Sonya went to the dentist today. Five cavities - a new record!

She said the dentist did only a minimum of scraping and polishing. Apparently she didn't need it. Her teeth were in good shape, really, except for all the cavities.

"Most people go through this when they're teenagers," the dentist explained.

"You mean it's a phase?" Sonya said, incredulous. (I'm sure that's how she said it, anyway. I wasn't there.)

I'll take this opportunity to add that I've never had a cavity. Not one. Nor braces, nor major dental work of any kind, really. I can take a ball of tinfoil, pop it in my mouth and chew happily.

I've seen grown men flinch and turn pale when I do this little trick.

This afternoon Sonya and I went to Circuit City to return a VCR to VCR cable we got a few weeks ago. It didn't work on our VCRs, our old VCR is broke anyway, and we are so damned broke we needed the cash.

After that we went to a Kroger in a nearby whitebread ghetto with our newfound funds to get the essentials (dog treats, cigarettes, shaving cream, cookie dough). On our way out Sonya looked across Riverdale Road at Don Pablo's and Joe's Crab Shack, two fairly new restaurants to that neighborhood.

"You know," she said, "those places are always full. I wonder why?"

"Becuase they inject some color and life, no matter how banal and factory-made, into the drab existence of suburbanites?" I guessed.

It's always nice to take a stab at the folks in the 'burbs.

That gosh-darn Titanic movie is on the HBO this evening. As I type, as a matter of fact. Say what you will, but I like the flick. Cameron knows how to get the audience's attention, no? His problem before this particular blockbuster was that not everyone likes action movies. Lots of people do, as the grosses for Aliens, Terminator 2 and True Lies show. Hell, I went to Universal Studios this year and the longest line I stood in was for Terminator 3D, which was the cinematic equivalent of Stephen King writing "Boo!" on a cocktail napkin.

Everybody, though, loves a love story. Especially a love story where a few thousand people die. Throw in Leo DiCaprio (number one sign you're a victim of Leomania: you rename your Geo Metro Geonardo DiMetrio) who the schoolgirls love, 'cause he's dreamy, and Kate Winslet (that girl is fuckin' built, y'all) and you've got the biggest blockbuster of all time.

And the new Star Wars movie's gonna knock it right off the top of the heap. Fame is fleeting, huh?

[Just for the record: you know that part, at the end of Titanic, where Bill Paxton throws his cigar into the ocean and gives his touching little speech? I would have liked it so much better if he'd thrown the cigar and said, "game over, man, game over."]

Dammit, I just watched the end again. And teared up. Again. That fuckin' horse picture gets me every time.

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