You know this, but
one perk of being a teacher is the school holidays. This week is Fall Break at school, so I took
off last Friday night for Arkansas for my beloved alma mater's homecoming. A quick description of the university I went
to - all those college brochures you got after you took the SAT. There are people clustered on the quad,
professors doing one-on-one work, social gatherings aplenty. All those things are real where I went to
school.
As soon as I rolled
into town, I tackled my brother and his soon to be wife, cleaned up from my
ghastly (though without mishap) red eye flight, and hit the quad. Homecoming Saturday is spent on the quad
seeing people. The clubs and orgs have
their tables set up and alums browse by and reminisce about things they used to
be a part of. I didn't do a whole lot of
browsing, more running, screaming and hugging.
Oh, it's good to see old friends.
The professors were much the same, though they didn't really carry their
own weight in the screaming department.
That's ok, they have to have a little more decorum than I do.
I felt like my heart
was coming home. It was as though I'd
never left. On the walk from Audrey's
(Jordan's fiancé's apt), which was also my old apt, I felt like I was going to class. I skipped, and trotted, and twirled. I considered resisting the urge, but I
promptly discarded that idea. That
afternoon, we all went to the homecoming football game. Don't ask me who won, I don't know. There were too many people between me and the
football field for me to actually watch much of the game.
Afterwards I threw
on a dress and heels and went to the early show of Tiger Tunes. You don't know what that is, do you? To say that it's a song and dance show is
like saying The Phantom of the Opera is a musical. It's a big deal, swathed in tradition and
sometimes there are glowsticks and lightshows
(thank you, Kappa Miners show). I
screamed and whooped my lungs out, which is a bit unfortunate because the early
show isn't that kind of show. The
Saturday early show is usually filled with parents who need to put children to
bed early and grandparents who want to see their grandkids perform. What these two groups of people don't
generally understand is the principle of Performer/Audience Reciprocity, which
can be understood in this way:
The performers on
stage are energized by the feedback of the audience.
The audience will
give enthusiastic feedback if the performers on stage are giving an energized
performance.
The conclusion of
this stage energy conundrum is CHEER LOUDLY whether or not the show is good
because the show will get better when you do, giving you a real reason to cheer
loudly. I didn't have time to explain
this to the people sitting around me, but I don't know if they would have
listened if I had. I just turned around
and went to the late show and enjoyed the more enthusiastic crowd filled with
riled up college students and young alums.
After the Saturday
late show, one of the clubs hosts an after party complete with a band on the
quad and a truck bed full of ice and rootbeer.
They have a chugging contest, which is how I chipped my tooth. I danced some line dances and was on my way
through the crowd to go to bed (it'd been a while since I'd slept), when they
started the contest. They announced the
first round between Girl 1 and Girl 2.
Girl 2 had disappeared or chickened out so they were calling for a
replacement.
[Perhaps
this is where I should explain my over eager propensity for raising my
hand. Magic shows, camp games, whatever
it is, as soon as they call for a volunteer, the joints in my right arm stiffen
and up it goes as though manipulated by an unseen puppeteer. It is an involuntary action that volunteers
me for all kinds of outlandish things.]
Up went my arm and
suddenly I was the replacement. I'd
never chugged rootbeer (IBC, to be exact) before, but I'd always wanted to see
if I could. So I did. And I won.
I also got rootbeer all over Mom's new Banana Republic eggplant cardigan
(but it washed out, so it was OK). A few
minutes later and I was competing against a girl they called by her last
name. You can generally assume that
girls called by their last names are going to beat you at a chugging
contest. And she did, and it was
amazing. Somewhere between GO! and
DONE!, I chipped a tooth. I felt it
after I was finished and walking home, slightly sticky. I must have smacked the bottle against my
front tooth a bit aggressively in the adrenaline rush of trying to force
carbonated liquid sugar down my throat.
The next day, after more [subdued] screaming and seeing people at church, I left
for Texas. I feel as though sometime
during my senior year of college, all my friends happened to be gathered
together and made a unanimous decision to move to Texas, mostly Dallas, Texas. I must have been grading things or working on
homework or something because I missed the memo. All that to say, the nearest and dearest all
live in Dallas now, so to Dallas I went, where there was more screaming and
hugging and exclaiming.
We ate great food,
watched TV, painted our nails, went to Sprinkles and Starbucks and generally
did a lot of wonderful nothing. It's a
bit odd to see our grownup selves gathering for dinner, but it's just nice to
be together again. Wednesday night we
went dancing, which I will tell you all about in another post. There were late night conversations and games
of spades and lazy breakfasts of cereal and coffee. There was also the Texas State Fair.
Yes, I did eat a
footlong corn dog and a fried Snickers bar at the State Fair of Texas. I sat in King Ranch F350 Fords and saw a
Texas Longhorn steer. I spent the day
with my aunt, uncle, cousin and some of their friends from back home. I like Texans. They're a spirited, down to earth, tough sort
of person, enough to make me want to study regionalism in the US, but that's
another story.
That night, Liz took
me to the airport, where I met curly-headed-extroverted-Jesus guy. We chatted about mission projects we'd done
and where we'd been in life and our beloved churches back home as we power
walked to security, both being late for our flights. It was a nice way to end a vacation, with a
guy asking how he could pray for you, just because you're family.
That's how Fall
Broke,
Little Miss Sunshine
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