My sister Sophie is turning 21 next month! I’m going up to Portland to help her celebrate. She has lots of fun places she wants to visit on her bar-hopping list, so I’ll have to resist the urge to call my dad at midnight to come pick me up when I get sleepy, ha ha. I did some quick research on her list to make sure I could hang, and it actually looks much tamer than I thought it’d be.

When I turned 21…

I celebrated with my college roommate whose birthday was in the same week as mine. Because it seemed, at the time, like all 21st birthdays should be wild and bordering on ridiculous, we went to the Sunset strip and drank booze out of plastic soda bottles on the way there (super classy, I know). All of the clubs we went to were obnoxiously loud so we couldn’t talk to each other, or anyone else for that matter, and they were all jam-packed which made dancing no fun.

At one point we were walking through a thick crowd of people. I was leading the way when all of a sudden her grip on mine tightened and she gave my arm a tug. I looked back and saw an old dude talking to her and figured he was being a creep. Determined to rescue her, I kept trying to pull her away. She kept tugging back which I took to mean “Hurry up, this guy is super weird.” When I finally succeeded in our escape, I expected her to give me a big smile and a thanks, but she just turned to me and said, “What are you doing? That was Bill Maher!” She had to explain to me who Bill Maher was and how he saw me trying so hard to pull her away. Then he called me a hater. Even though I wasn’t quite sure who he was, I knew I had just been called a hater by a celebrity which was just the kind of ridiculousness I’d hoped for.

What did you do on your 21st birthday? Was it wild? Memorable? Disappointing? 

(top image via Pinterest, bottom image of Bourbon and Branch)