When you grow up in a place where everyone's known you since you were in nappies, you carry around hundreds of versions of yourself. Each person you meet has frozen you at a particular moment - the time you threw up at the school dance, your awkward phase when your voice was breaking, that summer you tried to reinvent yourself and failed spectacularly.
The plan was to go to dinner, then go to a place that had a cover charge of $35. After looking at the menu, Lans decided to skip the dinner portion of the evening; he said the cheapest entree, a burger, was $41. Fries could be added to the meal for an exorbitant $11. (Lans said he assumed that at a fine dining restaurant, "the burger is just going to be three bites.")
You have food, you have alcohol, you have questions about what to wear, you have people you don't see very often, or who you see very often but not in this context. There's also a lot of pressure on the holidays in general. We have a lot of expectations that don't always align-like we want it to be a lot of different things, and maybe it can't be all of those things.
