In recent years, our church has reorganized its women’s organizational activities from large, over-the-top, grand-scale productions to smaller, more manageable groups based on common interests. Or, as my sisters and I refer to them, we now have church-approved cliques. Last night was the scrapbooking group, and since I haven’t scrapped in ages, I put some things together and did some scrapping.
I took not a single picture of my first year of grad school. I took pictures of my November trip to Indianapolis, pictures of the big snow storm in February, but absolutely nothing relative to being in school. There’s some psychology there that I prefer to not get into right now, but I felt it was important to document the lack of pics. Here’s what my first year of grad school looks like:
Then I scrapped a couple of plays I attended this summer. Nothing too surprising with this one:
But with the other play, well, good story here. The weekend before my birthday, I was supposed to go to South Carolina and visit my best friend. Circumstances beyond our control caused that trip to be canceled. When I received word of the cancellation, I happened to be chatting online with my bishop’s wife, and I told her I would be at church on Sunday after all. She asked why, offered sympathies, and then I went to bed.
I woke up the next morning and there was an email: “We have plans for your Friday night.” Nothing more. When I asked for details, she sent this gem: “We’ll probably be leaving about 5:45-6:00 pm but you’ll need to have dinner first. (I’ll let you know for sure after I discuss it with Craig.) Bring: bikini, binoculars, some kind of hat and a scarf…we’ll bring the camera. JK 😉 Bring nothing. It’s birthday celebration time.”
Friday night we started driving and an hour later we were in Huron, Ohio at a nationally recognized summer stock-type playhouse. They took me to see a play! It was a fantastic evening, and talk about a small world…as I looked at the cast head shots on the wall of the theatre, I realized one of the cast members was a student at East the first year I taught at West. The two schools traveled together quite a bit that year, but he graduated that first year and I wasn’t sure he’d remember me.
After the play was over, the cast was greeting the audience in the lobby, so I approached him and said, “You may not remember me, but I coached speech at West…” and before I could finish he remembered who I was and gave me a big hug. It was so cool to be taken to a random theatre on a random Friday night and see someone from Nebraska; a little slice of home on the weekend I was supposed to be with my best friend. ‘Twas lovely.
