so i was at debi's a couple weeks ago and we were going through one of her old scrapbooks (that might be redundant). as luck would have it, she saved the last five or six columns that val and i had written as 17-year-olds for the albion news.
somehow (i have no idea how) we were chosen to be the northwestern high school reporters for the '93-'94 school year. maybe it was our wit ... our charm ... our good looks. but probably it was because our mothers were best friends with the editor ... who, in another twist of fate, gave me my first real job after i graduated from college and once yelled at me at work for not helping my mother around the house more.
our column was widely known for being particularly silly and packed with inside jokes that hardly anyone outside the school community (and, often, outside our own little clique) could have understood. but still, i think we had good readership ... and we were damn good that the occasional interviews with school personnel. we asked tough questions like, if louise the lunch lady could be in the winter olympics, what event would she want to compete in? we totally had the elementary school reporters beat.
i'm pretty sure we were the last set of reporters to write an extensive yet unbelievably ingenious christmas poem, and the first to ever submit our column written on toilet paper. we were also the first to write an article completely with a lisp. by the time i got to this one in the scrapbook, debi had disappeared upstairs. she should definitely go back and read it.
i clearly remember the day val and i wrote it. we were at my house. it was a sunny day after graduation. and my aunt grace was visiting. val and i were on the back deck sounding out 300-ish words, carefully replacing every "s" (and "s" sound) with a "th." i swear it took us two hours to finish. nearing the end we asked grace how to spell "auf weidersehen" with a lisp. turns out it's "auf weiderthehen."
"are you making fun of one person in particular or everyone with a speech impediment in general?" grace asked.
hmmmm ... everyone.
somehow we lucked out and never got a letter to the editor for anything we wrote ... at least not that i remember. even tho i'm sure some things deserved it. that must be how you know you're good at something.
last week i wrote about stupid high school girls ... thanks to mandy and val, i'm remembering just how stupid we were and how we paraded it in front of a town week after week after week. but at least we were clever. and by senior year i wasn't wearing a headband anymore ... well, not regularly.
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