Friday Nights

When I was a kid, the days at school seemed to drag by as slowly as a snail crossing a highway. I believe time slowed down during the hours of a school day. While I can’t prove it, I feel fairly certain of this after years of watching the hands on the clock in our classrooms almost grind to a halt on a daily basis. It’s slightly possible that this was just a figment of my imagination, and could have been the result of looking forward to the coming weekend that always seemed so far away.

Weekends were like an oasis in the middle of a school week desert. We fought so hard to get there, that we wanted to get every bit of enjoyment from it that we could. So instead of just looking forward to Saturdays and Sundays, I also looked forward to kicking the weekend off right on Friday nights.

My dad traveled a lot, but when he was out of town he almost always made it back in on Friday afternoon. And I could read the signs of a fun Friday night in the works. Mom would be rushing around putting the finishing touches on cleaning the house, and Dad would be in the shower much earlier in the evening than on a normal work day. These things added up meant that we were going out on Friday night.

While we never did anything fancy on these Friday nights, we’d certainly go out to eat. Our dining rituals bounced around a little in the late 80s and early 90s. My earliest memories have us dining at Western Steer on Friday nights, which was a local, South Eastern basic steakhouse chain. My old man loved chopped hamburger steak, and way more times than not, he’d be having the chopped steak, baked potato, and grilled Texas toast for dinner.

Once Western Steer went out of business, Pizza Hut became the go to. I’ve covered Pizza Hut in past, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. But much like Eric’s experiences, it was more of an event than just a meal out on the town. We also almost always saw people there that we knew and that added to the whole experience.

But in those days, we mixed it up. Some Fridays we ate at Pizza Hut, while others we went to Wendy’s to enjoy the SuperBar which was new at the time. And mixed in with these options, we also would visit Bonanza Steak House, which was another simple steakhouse chain, similar to Sizzler.

While the dinners were great, it was the shopping that I really looked forward to. It was on these Friday nights that Mom would hit the department stores and picking up whatever we needed at home. This meant we would be going to Roses, Magic Mart, and Kmart all in the same night. You add to this the fact that I would get my allowance, and you can see why I got so excited for the shopping.

I would spend most of my allowance on Friday night, picking up some fun new toys to enjoy over the weekend. In those years it was usually some new G.I. Joe action figures, Construx, or a model kit of some kind. And I would always be sure to buy some kind of snack to enjoy through the weekend as well. This was usually one of those large bags of popcorn they sold at the KMart Cafeteria.

That bag of popcorn always came in handy when we got home on Friday nights, as I was allowed to stay up late and watch TV, and my go to in those days was USA’s Up All Night with Rhonda Shear. Nothing extended the Friday night quite like Up All Night showing a B-movie with awesome wrap arounds.

I made sure I made the absolute most of my Friday nights, and it always felt like I was making the weekend longer than it was supposed to be by doing this. While Saturdays and Sundays were each special in their own ways back then, Friday nights were when the “party” started. Or maybe it was more like the pre-show to the main events of the weekend. Either way, I made the most of those Friday nights, and wish I could go back and do it all over again.

Friday nights were so special that I can’t do them justice in just one story, so for this post I only thought back on those years when I was a kid. I’ll ge going back to this well again in the near future to remember the Friday nights of my teenage years.