I guess it’s an occupational sacrifice of running wild and looking pretty. In exchange for fulfilling days and even more fulfilling nights, Courtney Love, myself, and others like us must be able to count our remaining high school friends on one hand in order to keep the other free for drinks, cigarettes or slapping a fool.

So when Lauren, one of the few proud Chalmette High alumni I keep in contact with, recently called me to attend a dinner party at her boyfriend’s house, I couldn’t resist. Her boyfriend, Matt, had just moved into his own house in Chalmette and naturally wanted to show it off.

“You should come, the rest of the Dinner Crew will be there. Bring a dish.”

The Dinner Crew is a group of five former Owls who meet to eat, laugh, reminisce and get the dirt on who in our graduating class has given birth or gone to rehab.

Knowing that anything I attempted to cook would be inedible, I asked my mother for help. I presented her store-bought shrimp scampi to Lauren and Matt.

Before eating, Matt gave us a tour of the house:

“This is the living room with blah blah tile and the kitchen blah blah and the furniture was bought at Rooms to Go blah for blah amount of dollars blah.”

While I’m sincerely proud of him, I couldn’t help but ignore what he was saying to preserve my self-respect. I don’t see myself owning a house anytime soon and my stained and ratty couch was purchased for $20 from a crack-head. It wasn’t until dessert that I didn’t feel like the biggest screw-up at the party. After we finished eating, Daisha, who was in charge of preparing dessert, pulled the dessert out of her purse: seven heavily burnt cookies and a dime.

“Oh boo, I made a whole pan,” she reasoned, “but I got hungry on the way down here and those cookies were just tempting me.”

“On the way down here?” I asked as I threw a cookie against the counter to see if it would break. (It didn’t.) “You live on the West Bank, not Chicago.”

“I know, and I was going to get a pie when I was in Sam’s, but I didn’t know what kind of pie y’all wanted,” she said.

“Just get a pie, bitch,” I yelled. “As long as it isn’t burnt-ass cookie flavor, we’ll be pleased.”

As I chipped my tooth on a cookie, my head cleared.

I may not be domestic or own a house or show stability in any real way. But I at least have the decency to bring an apple pie.