♬ She came along, just like a song, and brightened my day... ♬

In 1974, 29 year old  Barry Manilow had his first hit with the song "Mandy".  As the song climbed to #1 on the Billboard charts in early 1975, a woman in the eastern suburbs of San Diego found out she was pregnant, and she loved Barry's song so much that she named her first child after it.  Sixteen years later, in my junior year of high school, Mandi sat next to me in Chemistry, and  she quickly became my best friend.  She made high school much more livable, but after school, we grew apart just as quickly as we had become close.  Tonight, after not speaking for most of the last 15 years, we had dinner.

Its funny how the memories can come rushing back.  Before dinner, I just thought of Mandi as the teenage sexual experience that really confirmed for me that I was definitely a big homo.  But there was so much more.

Mandi was friends with me throughout junior year, when I lost my virginity to the girl with the biggest boobs in high school (definitely not Mandi).  In the summer between our junior and senior year, Mandi and I used to spend all night talking on the phone.  I mean literally, we would call each other sometime around 11pm, and we would talk on the phone until 3am, 4am, or sunrise on the long nights.  We would listen to the same radio station, and sing each other Boyz II Men's "End of the Road", and Madonna's "This Used to Be My Playground."  

Mandy was funny, quick, and opinionated, which made her terribly entertaining.  I can't remember anything specific that we talked about, except for when she told me that she lost her virginity to a guy at school named Terry.  In the first few weeks of high school, Terry and I became friends who played masturbation games together.  In the last week of high school he became our valedictorian.  Somewhere in between, he and Mandi popped each other's cherries.  I was soooooo jealous (of her, of course).

Senior year came, and Mandi and I started working at the Krikorian movie theater in downtown El Cajon (that suburb we grew up in). The first time I had sex with a boy I boned my way into being two hours late for my shift, and I was so elated when I got to work that I told another girl that worked there about it.  The kids I worked with there became the first to know that I liked boys, and therefore I came out to Mandi pretty early.  She accepted me completely, and after a life of feeling so ashamed of myself, her acceptance really brought us closer together.  Shortly after the end of our senior year, we started dating.

It was a brief affair though, and I use the term "affair" loosely.  I remember that I was a projectionist (meaning that I started the films in the booth upstairs), and that she and I made out in the booth several times.  I remember that after the theater closed one night, we started a movie just for ourselves, and we messed around a bit in the back row of seats.  And then after a good month of foreplay, I remember that Mandi got us a cheap hotel room one night.  When we arrived, I found that she had prepared by sprinkling flowers and buying champagne.  It was all a wonderful gesture, but after having sex with several boys in the previous months, I was having a hard time convincing myself that I still wanted to have sex with a girl.  I wasn't smart enough to just say no though, so I gave it a shot.  I got the sailboat in the harbor, but within seconds the wind went out of my sails.  I don't think I need to describe how horrible it feels to go soft when you're actually inside someone, and I don't imagine it was much better for her either.  That pretty much ended our affair.

In the fall I started at San Diego State University, and Mandi moved north to go to USC.  We tried to keep in touch, but we had a hard time connecting after that.  The last time we hung out was sometime around the age of 19, maybe in our second year of college.  By that point I had become a pretty die-hard raver and was somehow pulling off being a fantastic student and a maniacal partier at the same time.  I tried to explain to Mandi on that last meeting how fun the candy pills in the rave scene could be, but she made it very clear that she did not approve.  She told me that I was on my way to becoming an addict, and couldn't see it any other way.  The energy was not good between us when we parted that night.  It took several years before the next email exchange took place.

Then last January, when I was living in New York, I went to see Barry Manilow in concert one night.  To my surprise, he was fantastic, and I couldn't help but think of Mandi when he sang his first #1 hit.  The next day, I sent Mandi an email telling her that I had a new appreciation for her name.  In the next few days we wrote several times with updates, and by the end, we agreed to see each other next time I was in town.  

Mandi was a pretty girl in high school, and she is probably even prettier now.  She seems really happy.  She is married, has two kids, lives in the suburbs, and is working 60+ hours per week in hopes of becoming a partner in her accounting firm.  And if you know me at all, you know that that description is almost my polar opposite (though I'm definitely much prettier than I was in high school too.  Oh god.  I had a mullet!).  But I guess that's half the fun of staying in touch with people, isn't it?  It can be very therapeutic to see how two people starting from the same point at some age can end up in such different places later on.  And I guess that's how I felt tonight.  Our little dinner became for me a retrospective on 15 years of adventure, sex, travel, love, friends, career, and an evolving identity.  And as I drove home, I thought, "Wow.  I sure am lucky."

Merry Christmas.