Stupid Pineapple-A cautionary tale

Today's post is on the topic of Stupid Pineapple, a blogfest, details at the link. You can still enter as long as you have an entry by midnight tonight.

Fifteen years ago, I was 25, in graduate school, and recovering from a painful breaking-off of a three year relationship. We had irreconcilable beliefs. I believed in monogamy and, despite statements to the contrary, he did not. There really was no meeting in the middle. Spring Break loomed with no real plans. I certainly didn't want to go home.

When three friends invited me on a cruise it seemed like a great idea. We were fit, wore bikinis, and liked to sit around the pools. So we had plenty of company, primarily a group of about seven guys from Boston who were obsessed with the movie Goodfellas. They were quite taken with my name, as the girlfriend of the main character in that movie is also named Nancy, so would call it out with great glee whenever I walked into a room, or onto the dance floor in a Cheers like manner.

I resisted most advances until Cozymel. I don't know how many of you have been to Cozymel, Mexico but it is beautiful and has been molded for tourists. My three friends and I spent most of our day there, baking on the beach, scrumptious strawberry daiquiris served in hollowed out pineapples with an umbrella and a straw stuck in the top, delivered by a cabana boy. They were, to date, the best daiquiris I have ever had, cold, sweet and tart, almost tingling on your tongue. Given my diminutive size at the time (5'2" about 110), drinking four to seven of them (not really sure of the count) may not have been my best choice.

My memory of catching some kind of a horse drawn conveyance back to the cruise ship is hazy. I am certain that those Boston boys joined us before we got there though. While details would be salacious, I will not go into them here. What I will say is I got a couple of things out of that night. The first being the herpes simplex I that showed up on my lip right after the cruise. The second, a hangover that kept me off the booze for about six months.

So each time one of those beauties pops up on my face. Or my husband's, since I inadvertently shared my gift with him in our first year of marriage, I remember those daiquiris and that sweet, tart taste. They tempted and seduced me with the power of that yellow fruit. So, I say to you all, "Beware the Stupid Pineapple."