Taking me back...

As I watched the Superbowl on Sunday... Bruce Springsteen sang this song. It blows me away how a song can take me back in time to the exact place and time and moment in my life... I used to laugh at my Mom when she would get all giddy about Hermans Hermits... she LOVED them and it made her remember times from high school. Good times. Good friends. I never understood it until now.

This song as well as the first couple on my playlist take me back in time to my college days. I do not know what I liked more in college... going to school or getting to know a lot of people because I worked part-time bartending and waitressing jobs in a couple of different local establishments in town. The bars I worked at were my community, my friends and my family when I was far away from everything familiar. I worked and played with good people who really cared about each other. Now that I think about it... I love my church community for the same reason I used to work and play at the bar. I was accepted, loved and had a blast in the meantime. :)

The cool part was that I was able to bartend with my best friend Nikki. We were friends since 1st grade. We went to the same college. ( I talked her into coming to Winona with me) We were a team and we had so much fun together. One of the bars we worked at was called Bullseye. Our bosses were Vern and Dave. They hired us both at the same time and watched out for us like big brothers.

Nikki would bartend (I could barely see over the bar) and I was working the shot bar which served mostly watered down schnapps from a weed sprayer... (it was insanity) she would chuck ice at me all night long. We would write notes to each other on napkins... and pass them back and forth. Our favorite part of the night was when a good song came on the jukebox... we had the remote behind the bar... we would crank it up loud on our favorite songs. If we didn't like the song we would skip it... I always skipped the song "Cecelia... your breakin my heart... ". It was way overplayed it drove me nuts.

We would laugh and sing and shout and hoot and holler. We would watch out for girls who were drinking too much and keep an eye out when we needed a bouncer or two in the area for boys who were drinking their bottles of "courage". But mostly the crowds we had in Bullseye was a great group of kids who were having fun. No one really drove in Winona. You could walk anywhere you wanted and there were super cheap cabs that would take you anywhere.

At the end of the night we were deliriously tired. We would count our tips, mop up nasty bar floors... clean nasty ashtrays.... cups of chew spit and junk everywhere. We even had to mop the bathrooms. It is a good thing we were deliriously tired because I am not sure if I were fully aware of the clean up process... I would have loved the job so much.