Florida teenager Brittney Calgrington booked the best party ever with all the most popular kids going, but despite getting the best caterer money could buy, the best DJ Craig’s List could book on short notice, and enough balloons to choke a lagoon, something went horrible wrong.
Everyone knows the common selfie, hell, everyone with a thumb has taken one at some point or another from the wobbliest toddlers to the bluest-haired Harriets. Normally the biggest hazard at a party like this is BBQ fingers or lackluster lighting, but Brittney didn’t realize the true depth of her closest friends’ shallowness.
“It started off fine,” said Brittney, who arrived fashionably late after hiding behind a plastic ficus for almost an hour. “The food was good and the music was okay, but even though people came, nobody was actually ‘there’.”
It was a cool, clear night at that banquet hall in Ft. Lauderdale but all the girls were so busy trying to find the right filter or invent a new trending hashtag that they couldn’t even bother to realize where they were, why they were there, or in many cases, whose party it even was.
When the evening’s starlet made her grand entrance, nobody noticed. She cleared her throat a few times, but it was drowned out by DJ Mad Mojo Hatta. Drastic times call for dramatic efforts, so she took the mic and started singing her favorite song “It’s Britney B*tch” by Britney Spears, but in her flustered haste, she didn’t inform the DJ of the game plan, so it was sadly sung atop an unaltered version of Despacito.
As poorly as you can imagine that would sound, guests in attendance reported that it was far, far worse.
Party attendee and self-proclaimed semi-bestie Emma Morgenbarch explained, “oh yeah, I remember when they did that gross mashup of Pitbull with an actual pitbull barfing half-human words over it. Not cool.” She paused a moment before adding, “I’m glad Brittney wasn’t there to hear it, she’d have actually had a reason for her bulimia.”
Brittney was indeed there, and she was the sick dog warbling poorly into one of Amazon’s top-rated wireless microphones under $35. No one knew. No one noticed. No one even cared. Their obsession with the perfect selfie outweighed even the viral potential of seeing her make such a social life ending embarrassment of herself.
After an hour of trying to make her presence known, she gave up and went home Tweeting out “Sorry I couldn’t make it, feeling nasty in the wrong way #tumtum #tacobell #nohashtags.”
Her parents are the first to admit their disappointment with her, suggesting they may move her to a new school in the fall and try again for a second Sweet Sixteen next year with a new group of friends. Her father wanted to remind everyone that he’s still “very proud of her,” but her step-mother, 23 year old Stephanie Plotz-Calgrington refused to comment, or indeed even hide her disgust.
Brittney’s friends later commented that she seemed to appear in the background of many of their selfies, but with the egregious use of filters, they chalked it up to the ghost of her pride.