There's a bit of background that must be clarified, however. We have a running joke for a good 10 years now (ever since we graduated from high school) over who gets put in our school's alumni magazine. The race, of course, is to see who stays OUT of it the most. Swathi is kicking my sorry ass in this game, most likely because I have a specific contact who has been known to feed info about what I'm doing to the alumni office. So I've ended up with a blurb in that magazine way more often than I care to admit. Back when we lived together at Bryn Mawr, whenever the magazine would appear with my name on it, Swathi would hoot on me for days.
I, however, had one hell of a trump card I could shoot back at her, and of course I did so routinely. That trump card was that at least I was never on the COVER of the alumni magazine, unlike Swathi. This brings us to Exhibit A, the edition that came out our senior year of high school, when Swathi had her professional debut as a Bharatha Natyam dancer and toured India. This was obviously a huge and amazing moment, and the school capitalized on it to put her portrait on the cover.
We refer to this portrait as "the Mobutu" because it appeared about as frequently and in as many random places as Mobutu Sese Seko's portrait back in that Zaire days. Thank goodness Swathi is both a much better and much more attractive person than Mobutu, but you get the point. The Mobutu made the cover of The Patriot.
Ok, so that's one piece of the story. Here's the other piece:
Back in the summer between 9th and 10th grade, one of our friends had a birthday party at which the main activity was to paint her treehouse. This was the kind of friend who planned her parties down to the last minute and got really stressed when they didn't run according to schedule. In any case, this particular party has gone down in history among the rest of us as "the Tom Sawyer party," since it was basically a bribe to get us to paint a freakin' treehouse. We saw this as highly questionable on many grounds, to wit:
1) Dragging friends over ostensibly for a party and then making them sit around and paint is already an issue, particularly since she took full editorial command over the choices. At one point I distinctly remember wanting to paint a certain thing on the door and she made a comment along the lines of "well, fine, do whatever you want, but I'll paint over it anyway." So yeah, not a way to keep your company happy.
2) This is all compounded by the fact that we were 14 and hence not quite at the age to have a sense of humor over being dragged to do things that seemed immature.
Thus the Tom Sawyer party. Swathi hooted on said party for years, as she couldn't make it due to a dance conflict. So she didn't suffer the indignity of being 14 and having to paint the house.
At the very end of the party (the next morning), the father of one of our friends (who is an excellent photographer) came to pick up his daughter and snapped a picture of us. Yes, you can see exactly where this is going. What I remember about the picture was that I had just hit my head REALLY HARD on the roof of the treehouse (just as I was too old to be climbing around the treehouse, I was also way too tall to be doing so). This was probably the second worst headache of my life, second only to the one I got when I knocked myself out on a water ride at wildwater kingdom. But I digress.
So now we fast-forward to last night, and I was having dinner with my violin teacher from childhood, who also teaches at GA. She comes in casually carrying the school's calendar for the upcoming year. This year is the 250th anniversary of the school's founding (we had to memorize the 1759 founding date when we were about 7, haha), so they're doing all sorts of festivities in honor of the big year. Putting old pictures on the calendar appears to be one such memorialization event. So anyway, my teacher walks in carrying the calendar. I was like, "oh what's new with the calendar?" And she was like, "well, I figured I had to bring it in because I recognized someone on the cover!"
OHHHHHHHHHHH. This leads us to Exhibit B:
YES, THAT PICTURE IS NOW ON THE COVER OF THE CALENDAR. It's a good photo composition-wise, but we sure look like hell given that we'd just been through a sleepover party centered around PAINTING A TREEHOUSE. My friend Lauren, center bottom, had the very logical theory that it made the cover because Laura, the girl on the top (who sponsored the party), is wearing a very visible Germantown Academy t-shirt. Makes a lot of sense to me. But the girl on the middle row with me didn't even go to GA! She made a lot of the pictures because she was Laura's best friend growing up. We all loved her, she was very sweet...but yeah, she definitely made the cover of the calendar too, hahahaha.
In any case, I think Lauren summed it up quite well when I called her last night and she was like, "I think this both makes and breaks my night, all at once!" ohhhhhhhhhhhh.
hahahaha you're a calendar girl. this is great!
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