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[aint_no_life_nowhere]

136. When I was 15 and went to high school for a year in France

back in 1965, they served beer and wine in the school cafeteria at lunchtime. Amazingly, I never saw any kid get drunk (you'd get kicked out of school). In fact, it was a new building and when I went to the inauguration, the French socialist mayor Gaston Deferre (who later became a presidential candidate) gave a speech to all the kids and then they offered each kid two cocktails from long tables where glasses were lined up. I think I had a martini and a gin and tonic. I would often go to a sidewalk cafe on the old port in Marseille with a school friend and we'd have a couple of beers (a great tasting semi-dark French beer called Pelforth). We were 15 and it was legal to drink beer outside on the sidewalk but you had to be 21 to go inside the bar and drink. I think that because alcohol was so available and didn't represent a forbidden taboo for a rebellious young kid, I never became hooked on alcohol. In fact, now I very rarely drink.

By contrast, just before I went to France for a year I remember shopping with my mom at a store in Colorado. She was buying groceries for her brother. She told me to go grab a six-pack of beer and put it in the shopping cart. When the store owner saw me doing that he came over and chewed me out, saying it was illegal for me to even touch a container of alcohol.