I'm gonna be there til the end.
I spent my mid-twenties living in the Lower Haight in a Barbary Lane party house at Webster and Hermann… and it was a blast… my roommates were fabulous and I was their sister wife.
It was one raucous party after the next, each one more extravagant than the last… I used to get my make up done at the MAC counter followed by a crazy up-do.. the more outrageous the better… I'd don eyelashes and platforms and boas... and flit around on various mood enhancers.
Halloween parties were epic...we always had an array of drag queens…one year the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence showed up…69 Webster was on the party circuit.
We had a huge rooftop attic that had also been converted into a party den, with shaggy lavendar carpet, twinkly fairly lights and various discarded pieces of garage sale art… downstairs was the club, upstairs was the lounge.
There was always a core group, besides my roommates of course, including S the stunningly beautiful dragonfly goddess who was a clairvoyant…the utterly amazing B who wore very little except a mountain of wigs and various skull jewelry (pre-Johnny Depp)…and a swath of Mission hipsters who worked in various indie record shops and vintage clothing stores.
I was the square one.. holding down a corporate job in publishing… editorial assistant by day, Priscilla by night.
Those friendships were beautiful and pure.. no pretense.. no judgement.. just a bunch of creative people expressing ourselves without a care in the world, not needing to fit in… just wanting to experience ife.
It was also during those years we went to Burning Man with much of the same crew…camping in disheveled bedouin tents in Center Camp when there were less than twelve thousand people, before RVs were allowed, eating Raman and floating around on e or acid or both.
I loved every minute of those years… and to this day for the most part we are still in one another’s lives… there were a couple casualties and B hung up his wigs.. but for the most part everyone is still around.
Last time we all got together we had a boozy brunch in the Castro.. with various offspring in tow and prescription meds now that we are adulting...Everyone is still the same.. except now we share those exquisite memories of our worry-free youth, Moby, glitter and pure unadulterated joy... which seems so much more poignant these days and a very very long time ago.