Get Low, Get Low, Get Low

The summer after my freshman year, I spent the majority of my time with two of my new friends from college who also lived near me in Massachusetts. Lizzy had gone to a private school much like mine, and a mutual friend had very knowledgeably informed me, before I even knew she existed, that we “would thoroughly loathe one other.” Meanwhile, ten years later, she and I are still close friends, and I don’t even know if that other kid is still alive. David was a year ahead of us at school, and I had actually met him through my father, who was his dermatologist: to this day David likes to tell people we met because my dad asked him where he went to school while giving him the infamous, all-inclusive “full body skin exam.” Use your imagination: it’s as weird (and as true) as it sounds.

To say the three of us spent a lot of time together would be an understatement. We did, in fact, spend too much time together, which became blatantly obvious when we started bickering over piddly things like bendy straws and constellation formations and Solitaire strategies. At one point I got so furious at David, I demanded he stop the car, and I stormed out in a rage, refusing to get back inside. This would seem much more dramatic if we were, say, on the shoulder of the Mass Pike, next to a treacherous, boulder-lined ravine, cars streaking furiously by in the middle of an arctic cold night, but alas, it was a warm summer evening and we were only a block from my house, which is in a very quiet neighborhood filled with ivy covered houses and well behaved golden retrievers. By the end of the summer, Lizzy announced that she and David were going on a “friend break,” where they would take time to “see other friends,” “have some space,” and “stay in touch.” “It’s not you, it’s me,” she sighed to him while we ate soggy waffles in the dining hall one night. Evidently, our three-way relationship was immensely complex.

But before any of that went down, Lizzy accidentally started dating a man from Africa named Dumi (pronounced Doo-Me, which of course sparks an unceasing deluge of bawdily obvious jokes that are truly and consistently hilarious). As the tale goes, the two of them went out for french fries and a stroll in Boston Common after work one day, and all of a sudden, “Out of no where!” she’d proclaimed with honest astonishment, Dumi reached for Lizzy’s pale hand and she realized they were on a date. Oops. But like any good, repressed, religiously educated girl, the idea of dating someone who was just so wrong seemed exceptionally appealing: Dumi was thoroughly unlike any of the dweeby, honker-faced, socially graceless, athletically hopeless, Nice Jewish Boys we had spent most of our lives thus far grumbling about. Predictably, before long, David and I were hearing about Dumi and his dreadlocks all. The. Time.

Dumi and Lizzy had the same birthday which, back then, she was sure was some sort of sign. He was having a party in Somerville, and had invited Lizzy. Consequently, both David and I were required to regrettably attend. In our suburban bubble, however, we had never gone to Somerville before, which, if you don’t know, is hipster heaven: too-tight jeans, black rimmed glasses, ironic facial hair, messenger bags, and bicycles abound. And we, in our polo shirts and ribbon belts and Rainbow flip flops (and David in his College Republicans baseball hat), were not yet acquainted with this strange subculture; we were so far out of our element we might as well have been going to actual Africa as far as David and I were concerned.

When we arrived at the party, and after a very brief survey, it turned out where we were pretty much the only white kids in sight. All three of us grew up in extremely homogeneous neighborhoods, so this situation was far more weird for us than it should have been. We stood in the doorway for a few minutes, looking dorky and white and knowing absolutely not another soul there, and I punched Lizzy in the shoulder. “Happy birthday. I hate you,” I said. Why did someone else’s relationship always make me feel like I wanted to die?

Dumi came over to Lizzy, guitar in hand, and gave her a big a hug and a noogie before returning the couch and a set of bongo drums. Watching Dumi, Lizzy suddenly said, trancelike, “I really like his party shirt.” “His what?” said David. “His party shirt!” “What does that even mean?” David asked, as perplexed as I was. “That shirt he’s wearing--the party shirt! For his birthday! To celebrate!” Lizzy is not a dumb girl by any means, but sometimes she says things and you really have to wonder what she could possibly be thinking. Dumi was not wearing a “party shirt,” but was, in fact, wearing an authentic tribal shirt from his home back in Africa. Lizzy, however, quite seriously thought it came from the Party Warehouse in the Festive Attire aisle, and refused to believe otherwise no matter what David and I said to her. 

While David and I spent the rest of the night (and the rest of time) talking about the “Party Shirt” and feeling uncomfortably white and uncomfortably preppy, Lizzy mingled with the other party-goers, drank her weight in beer, and Got Low to Lil’ Jon’s latest hit, a song that, to this day, I cannot hear without getting a disturbing mental image of Lizzy on the dance floor. At the end of the night, some sort of relationship-esque drama transpired concerning Dumi, to which Lizzy smartly retorted with a stamped foot and a slurred, “Well, I didn’t like your party shirt anyway!”

That showed him!

Behold, the legendary Party Shirt