It’s Happy Hour on the Virtual Verandah.  Me and Memphis Earlene are trading war stories.  Mine are tame compared to hers.

Blues Women eat meat and pack heat.

Just because you shot that two timing man doesn’t automatically make you a Blues woman, but it’s a good start, says Memphis Earlene.  So is buying him an Armani suit, or paying his child- support.

Without the birth control pill and Motown music I’d probably still be a virgin.

There was a brief period, roughly 1964-1981 when sex got deregulated and  drugs could cure all sexually transmitted diseases.  Freedom wholesale was handed to girls like me who hadn’t consciously set out to be sexual outlaws but were willing to put up with a degree of male loutishness the way  immigrants from repressive regimes give America the benefit of the doubt.

“Woke up the morning of my Advanced Civil Procedure final exam with a hangover in a strange bed with a strange man whose pick-up line was  You must be a Libra. There was a mirror on his bedroom ceiling, a fire-place bar in his living room, and not a book in sight.”  I tell her.

“There you go bragging again,” says Memphis Earlene.

“No, I was an idiot.  The time to get drunk at Daisy Buchanan’s  and blow off  steam is after final exams, not the night before.   I got a C plus on what should have been an easy A.”

But I didn’t get pregnant like I might have before birth control was readily available, and my life wasn’t ruined.