Song of my selfie

In 2014, it seemed selfies were everywhere.

From Ellen DeGeneres and friends breaking Twitter records at the Oscars this February, to Jimmy Kimmel attempting to break that record with the Clinton Family a month later, it was hard to get away from those self-inflicted, vanity-driven, smartphone photos.

Including here. This is a story about a selfie 32 years in the making.

It begins in June 1981, a senior trip for 10 newly graduated high school girls packed into two rooms of the Aku Tiki Inn in Daytona Beach, Fla.

I still have a hard time believing our parents let us go. But it was a different era, somewhere MTV’s “Girls Gone Wild” and the 1960s “Beach Blanket Bingo.” Girls Gone Mild, maybe, if you count fake IDs and skimping on sunscreen while our mothers were home saying Hail Marys.

Every life should experience a trip like this – lying on the beach by day and dancing by night – and I’m glad I did. Plus, I’m pretty sure those Hail Marys worked. The only real danger, it turned out, was sunburn and choking on the hairspray produced by 10 girls in two rooms.

Last November, five of us returned to the Aku Tiki Inn on an unseasonably cold, gray Florida day. It was during our 50th birthday trip, a gift to our friendship, and one day we drove an hour to seek out the same hotel in which we had spent those 10 days in June.

Can you pass through a place just once and remember it like it was yesterday? The giant Tiki man above the hotel marquee said yes.

Within 20 minutes, five 50-year-old women were frolicking on the same beach on which they played at the age of 18.

That’s when we took the selfie. But first, I took a picture of the selfie-in-progress. Looking at it now, I not only can see our 18-year-old faces; I can hear Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” and Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl” — two songs played incessantly in clubs of the era — over and over again.

If you look closely, you can see a lot behind that selfie. All five of us are wearing sunglasses, perhaps to hide crow’s feet. The surf is churning and the wind is flipping our hair. But we’re all smiling.

At the moment it was taken, I remember thinking I could see myself on that beach 32 years earlier and wishing  I could say a few things to five skinny girls lying on that beach applying iodine-infused baby oil.

For starters, I would have told them to skip the baby oil and invest in sunscreen. I might also have said something about not getting too attached to the music of Rick Springfield, but that wouldn’t have surprised anyone.

Instead, I might have said this:

You all will experience love and loss in one way or another, but be better people because of it.

You will have careers that come and go.

You will face financial hardships and emotional setbacks.

You will survive.

None of you will be wealthy, but you’ll all be rich because you’ll have children and families that matter, and friendships that endure – including one memorialized on a Florida beach.

A picture-perfect selfie.

A version of this was first published in the South County Times March 28, 2014.