I was fourteen that summer. I remember it because I wasn't old enough to drive, none of us were, only Lexi. We spent the summer cramming into the bed of her red pick-up truck driving through the neighborhoods between the high school gym and the gymnastics gym where we were all taking tumbling classes. We made frequent stops at Sonic grabbing cherry limeades and cheese tater tots and ate them sitting on the cement in the back of the high school eyeing the boys at football practice pretending that we had out t-shirts tied up around our bosoms because we were actually hot in the Texas sun. We painted thirty-foot tall run-through signs with her truck pulled up next to us on the grass with the windows down and the radio blaring. We were tan and cute, insecure and unsure, but a group of ten that couldn't be separated.

The nostalgia of that summer all came rushing back to me just a bit ago as I watched an Alanis Morrisette concert on VH1. It's the tenth anniversary of Jagged Little Pill. That's right, ten years! I remember the first time I heard the lyric "will she go down on you in a theater" flying out of the CD player at cheerleading camp that June and being both shocked that she would say something like that and unsure if I really even knew what that meant! Ten years ago this summer the hard edge that was Alanis, the curly-haired-wild-child-feminist anthem singer, took over all of my friends and we would sing out loud and dance around everytime the You Oughta Know video came on MTV. And every subsequent video got just as much respect (especially the one where she plays four differnt people in the car!) Alanis could do no wrong. Even the unplugged verion she did on the MTV awards with the orchestra behind her...man, even though I had never been in love, I felt all of her pain. I still do.

So it seems fitting that ten years later, ten years older, we'd get the offical acoustic version of the CD full of young girl anthems all retooled for the grown-up women who remember it best. I think I'll grab myself a copy and relive the summer of my youth. This time with a little less anger, a little less revealed tummy, but a definite refill of the cherry limeade.