This one’s been on my mind for the last couple weeks so lets see if I can retell it before my ride gets here. It’s occured to me that a lot of what may be contributing to my general amnesia about anything between 2003-2010 is because I never tell my stories, blogularly or otherwise. So here ya go.

I was 18, I think. My friend was dating a famous television actor and we were going to his birthday at the Red Lion in Atwater. This was going to be the first time I’d ever “hung out” with a celebrity because of a mutual friend, not because I was at a book signing in the Grove or whatever. I remember putting on perfume and my nicest Gap cardigan and being picked up in the circle drive by my dorm in Loyola, then making the trip all the way across the goddamn town to go to this party. To this day I get a twinge of guilt whenever I’m on the 10 freeway, thinking of how many times my older friends drove that miserable trip in order to include this dumb college freshman in their social activities.

Anyway we get there and my one friend (who is also half Japanese but doesn’t look anything like me) gave me her expired license, and I waited outside the bar for 15 minutes after everyone else went in, as usual. This worked more often than you’d think, I only got caught once and it was at the Westwood BrewCo, of all places.

I was still not able to relax at bars that weren’t hosting some sort of Indie Rock show, fear of getting caught and just general social anxiety basically kept me from having a good time. But oh, how fun to be at a celebrity’s birthday, and there by several degrees of invitation, no less! I sat down and these girls that I guess were friends of friends were all drinking beers. The waitress came by in her dirndl and asked what I wanted and I was all, “Oh, uh… I don’t know, what are you ladies having?” all casual like, like I’d had everything on the beer list but just wasn’t sure if I was looking for something more hoppy or malty or… Yes, 18 year old Loyola Marymount student Emily Yoshida: premier beer connoiseur.

They were all drinking the Hefeweizen and I went for that, plus it had an orange in it and I knew that oranges tasted good. I drank Rolling Rock all through high school and Tecate since arriving in LA, and not even Tecate with limes in it. So this seemed like a fucking top shelf Margarita by comparison. The waitress brought me the beer and I thanked her and took a sip, admiring the cloudy, almost dreamsicle color of the beer.

“It looks like a dreamsicle!” I said, hoping that maybe sounding intentionally like an idiot might endear me to these scowling twentysomething hipster chicks who were totally not wearing Gap cardigans.

“That’s the carbonation,” said a particularly morose one. (Which, in retrospect, huh?)

For whatever reason, I had never thought of beer as being carbonated before. Carbonation was for Diet Coke, not fancy beers with oranges in them. “This is carbonated!?” I blurted out almost instantly, while taking a sip and getting a bit of the head on my nose.

The hipster girls all looked at me like I was wearing my fake ID on my forehead. “Uh, all beer is carbonated, honey,” the one said.

I will never forget that all beer is carbonated, and I will never forget that particular flavor of humiliation that night at the Red Lion. I didn’t even get to meet the TV star, what the fuck.