My best friend when I was in high school was a girl named Linda Wilson. We met in Grade 10. She lived across the back yard from myself in a house that backed onto ours. We did everything together. We were in the same class at school. There was only her and her younger brother and she had her own record player and got a generous allowance, which she used to buy 45 records. She had just about every popular record on the Hit Parade. On Friday nights we would sit up in her bedroom listening to the records, talking about boys and dreaming about a time when a boy might finally ask us out on a date. We would practice slow dancing with a hanger hooked onto the back of her closet door, with her bathrobe draped over it. (Embarassing but true.) I mean . . . God forbid we went to a dance and didn't know how to actually dance with a boy! One time we even pooled our money to buy a book, "How to Get a Teenage Boy" (and what to do with him when you get...