I Could Have Done Something For Spring Break
An ode to my "golden age of magazines" story that never was...
Hello! You are subscribed to a newsletter for a site called Very Famous that hasn’t really existed lately. Maybe sometime soon I’ll bring back this corner of the internet that I created to be a hotline for moments of convenience store glamour and strip mall escape throughout the day. In the meantime, here is something I wrote about spring break. Thanks for reading!
It doesn’t make much sense, but I’ve been thinking spring break was gonna save me. About two weeks before the pandemic got going, I pitched a story about spring break on South Padre Island, Texas, that I hoped would set my career in motion in the way I would like it to move. It would have been a story, ahem, “looking at the state of the American spring break party on the beach through the regional lens of South Padre Island, Texas”.
Padre Island is my favorite beach on earth. It doesn’t brag about this, but it is the world’s longest barrier island. The water is warm, the waves are calm. You can swim relatively unmonitored, and there are plenty of free access points. A 1959 law, the Texas Open Beaches Act, makes the state unique in that its gulf-front beaches are open to the public from the vegetation line to the low tide line. Property owners, in other words, can’t put up “No Trespassing” signs on the beaches in front of their homes. This also means that Texas beaches are considered public highways. Having the freedom to barrel up and down much of the state’s coastline probably isn’t great for nature and, in some spots, lit-up oil refinery castles butt up against water. Unlike East and West Coast beaches, Texas beaches haven’t been assigned a distinct personality which makes them pretty flexible. I appreciate that it’s an easy way to enjoy sand and water.
South Padre Island, in particular, is close to my heart. It was my beach growing up in the Rio Grande Valley. There’s a single highway that runs the length of the island and dead ends physically and spiritually into a mountain range of dunes. It feels totally exhilarating to see the road disappear, an optical illusion made real.
South Padre is also, for a few weeks in March, a spring break destination for mostly Texan and Midwestern college students looking for an affordable party on the beach.
Here was my almost-accepted pitch:
I'd like to pitch a story reporting on the state of spring break on South Padre Island. In a post-MTV-Spring-Break era, I want to explore how popular the traditional idea of spring break as a madhouse party on the beach still is through the lens of Padre Island. I think this story could be approached from two different angles or a combination of both.
I'd like to explore the business side of it by talking to the people who make spring break happen—the restaurant/bar owners and promoters—and the cultural side of it by talking to students and performers there for the festivities and debauchery. I'm curious to know how the famous (and historically dangerous) vacation holiday has evolved—or if it has—in a post-#MeToo time. I'm also interested in answering a perhaps lighter question: Is a spring break beach party still cool?
“Post-#MeToo time”… ;-)
The editor responded after things had begun shutting down, writing that she would be interested in revisiting the pitch next year. I did not revisit it the next year, 2021. True to the moment, I was instead fostering a traumatized chihuahua in Brooklyn who was in as strange and uneasy a spot as me.
Every March for at least the last five years, a neon biological clock rings for me and I think, “It is spring break, I should do something.” I’ve tried to build a writing career around how people escape their daily lives — the objects, places, and experiences that make the day a little weirder or more fun or more mysterious. Reporting on spring break after the MTV camera crews and celebrity hosts had left the beach (the last MTV spring break party was in 2014) felt like exactly what I was meant for. Had a pandemic not happened, it seems likely that in 2020 I would have gone to South Padre Island to do some reporting. Who knows how it would have turned out. In my fantasy world, some kind of Kentucky Derby/decadence/depravity type thing, but in reality, I don’t think I could have gotten away with that. Not in today’s economy!
I’ve spent a little over 10 years waiting for my big break — waiting being a key word. Somehow I thought reporting on spring break would summon an era that no longer exists. As Slate editor Jenny G. Zhang shared from former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s new memoir:
Younger people would never understand the expense-account stories of the time, because that all disappeared with the Great Recession,” Carter writes matter-of-factly, in a passage that has surely been shared in countless journalist group chats with a healthy dose of “fuck me.”
Writing a spring break epic felt like it would, maybe ironically, get me taken seriously as the kind of writer I’ve wanted to become. The most attention I’ve ever received from my writing was one of my first stories I wrote at age 25, an assignment from xoJane editors to have my then-boyfriend dress me for a week and write about it. The story itself I was decently proud of, but the topic was an exercise in xoJane-era internet essay humiliation. It went confoundingly viral in the way that internet essays written mostly by women in their twenties did for a while there. I got calls from Australian radio stations and repurposed in the The Daily Mail. Not much about my career writing online has made sense to me.
I’ve tried probably two or three other times to hazard another “golden age of magazines”-style story, to level up beyond the stories that have been easier for me to both write and to get accepted by editors. Pretty much anytime I’ve tried to take a risk, editors have disappeared on me. I have disappeared on people who probably thought they were taking a risk too. It’s hard to see each other’s visions. But spring break, for me, remains the one who got away, the story that could have been. The less excitement I felt about writing, the harder it was for me to imagine reporting it.
When I pitched the story in February 2020, it was intended to be on-the-scene reporting with some speculative nostalgia. By the following pandemic year, the idea had become just nostalgia for me, sweet and stuck. In my apartment trying to escape the world around me, I would trawl YouTube for old clips from MTV specials, like a 1996 video of Bush’s Gavin Rossdale singing “Glycerine” in the rain in Panama City or Molly Sims and Tyrese introducing Crazy Town. It was a comfort to hear Molly Sims yell deliriously into the mic: “I would like to welcome you to Spring Break Fashionably Loud straight from Fat Tuesdays in Can-cun Mexico!”
For someone who thinks a lot about spring break, I’ve been just once with my high school boyfriend and his friends, a sort of strait-laced group of guys who weren’t wanting to get in any big trouble. From a safe distance, I could see the Girls Gone Wild camera crew and teens with water gallon jugs of beer, and I knew that I would never be of that world as someone who spent her high school Friday nights hanging at coffee shop open mics.
It sounds freaky to approach groups of college kids drunk on the beach, but they would have been my subjects. I’m trying to think of what questions I would have asked them. “How did you get here?” “Are you having fun?” There might not be much more to ask if we’re getting down to it. They would have been around 19 experiencing this for the first or second time; it’s not like they would have reflected on the spring break experience pre- and post-MTV.
The last time spring break was depicted in the monoculture was, I’m pretty sure, Spring Breakers. It was a perfectly dark-sided answer to the movie that helped invent the great, big American spring break, 1960’s Where the Boys Are. In the ‘50s, four girls tried to find love and adventure in Fort Lauderdale. By 2012, these four girls are hanging with drug dealers, holding up diners, and sticking guns in their mouths. If the parents panicking in 1960 could have seen the future, they would have felt like Satanic Panic psychics. Maybe the end of the great, big American spring break wasn’t the MTV cameras leaving the beach but Vanessa Hudgens and crew wearing pink balaclavas, dancing around James Franco playing piano as the sun sets.
By 2023, the sheen of absolute nostalgia was wearing off for me. I started to feel claustrophobic, trapped in a room with a constant stream of digital ephemera that allowed me to spend chunks of my day in the past, scrolling past heart-shaped tubs and old red carpet images of celebrities looking like they’re having more fun than we are now. Spring Break 2023 was when I tried to return to the present.
I found Mikey G, a YouTuber from where I grew up in South Texas who was documenting spring break as a 19-year-old sipping from a bottle of 1800 tequila in a motel room surrounded by friends wearing Mardi Gras beads and vaping. He was his own gonzo reporter, his own Girls Gone Wild crew, and his own spring breaker, all rolled into one. Watching his videos reminded me of exactly what spring break has been and will be without the broadcast television nostalgia: sweat, sand, skin, warm liquor, wet motel floors.
Last year, reflecting my decaying-but-free outlook, I became interested in a great white shark named LeeBeth who swam a history-making journey that happened to coincide with spring break. LeeBeth, named after the daughter of a church pastor who helped tag her, swam the furthest west a great white shark has ventured into the Gulf of Mexico (at least that we have tracked). She was detected about 200 yards from the shore, the length of a standard swim competition. Not that college kids on spring break spend much time in the ocean, but the ones who were floating around didn’t know they were swimming close to 14-foot, 2,600-pound LeeBeth, a 30-year-old female who loves to break the water up top, hence her success in being tracked. “I've got to say, she's kind of a shark celebrity at this point, which is awesome,” research scientist Megan Winton told the Mississippi Clarion Ledger. “She has been quite the ambassador for the species because she pinged so much along the way and in places where people didn't think white sharks were.”
This, I’m half-sorry to report, is another spring break I wasn’t present for. Lite internet searching revealed that spring break on South Padre Island might not be what it once was. Texas Week isn’t really a thing anymore, someone wrote on Reddit, referring to the week that Texas universities traditionally get off for spring break. A local news article speculated that South Padre Island was becoming more of a family friendly spring break destination, reporting that fewer college students were partying on the beaches of South Texas. I felt sick relief reading this, thinking that at least now I wouldn’t feel like a guilty loser for not pursuing this idea I’ve had on my mind for years. But I don’t want the kids to lose spring break.
Just when I thought I’d have to end this piece remember-whening, Mikey G dropped part one and two of his 2025 trip to the beach. In the past few years, he has shared mostly videos of himself and his friends partying with titles like “Crazy House Party Gets Out Of Control…(COPS PULLED UP)” or “College Dropout Goes To A College Party!” In recent months his videos have pivoted to calmer topics like his pet hamster and weight training.
It turns out Mikey G spent two weeks on Padre Island, which he says came out of nowhere. At the beginning of the video, he’s brushing his teeth in a parking lot. This is his third year at the beach for spring break. He was supposed to be on his way to Utah, he explains, but plans changed. “2025 is going to be a classic,” he says about a minute into the first video. “This is the youngest we’re ever going to be.”
His next line surprises me. “We’re going to be freaking living in the zone for two weeks sober, completely sober,” he emphasizes. “We’re not going to be lost in the sauce this time. Lock the freak in.” Throughout the videos, he serves as the designated driver, chats with a Monster Energy representative stationed on the beach, and encourages his viewers to drink water.
As Mikey and his friends drive around in a Mustang convertible, everything’s classic and activities are framed as a first-person shooter game. “We’re dropping into the war zone, squad mission four deep,” Mikey tells us as we’re watching him and his friends hang out in their condo, psyching themselves up for a night ahead that we never get to see. They’re walking in the dark in a parking lot when Mikey lays out how he envisions the night going. “Patrick Bateman mode, fuck it, tomorrow Jordan Belfort, then Andrew Tate mode, fuck it,” he says. “But guys this is day zero, literally.” He mentions the night’s blood moon.
By the second video, Mikey has been there for three days. “It’s officially like day one,” he says while alone recording at the gym. “We’ve been here for three days, but it’s basically day one.” A few minutes later, we see Mikey and friends getting ready to go to the beach; a girl in the background is spraying sunscreen on a guy’s chest. The rest of his friends are looking into the camera. “Last night we were saying we freaking were back, but like nothing even freaking happened for the past three nights, and we’ve already been here like four days so what the fuck?” Mikey says to his right-hand man, his costar of sorts who goes unnamed.
I feel Mikey on this. For me, too, it often seems like day zero on day three. What the fuck? This is the youngest I’m ever going to be, after all.
