Part one in my multi-part interactive online artwork series, cleverly entitled Random Stuff That I’ve Scanned From Old Boxes Of Papers And Photos. The interactive part comes in when you leave comments. :)

These first two photos are from Christmas 1992, Ginger’s 21st birthday party. I can only assume we celebrated with alcohol earlier in the evening, because we came home to her mom’s house and decided that it would be a GREAT idea to decorate the Christmas tree with socks and bras. Allllll kinds of bras and socks. I think they were all Ginger’s dainty things…. or maybe we each contributed some, I can’t remember. Her mom knew that we were all “artsy” types and was cool with having her tree decorated unconventionally.

This tree decoration was only topped by one Christmas when Ginger and I shared an apartment, when we made terribly naughty gingerbread people out of salt dough and hung them on our tree. Too bad I don’t have any photos of that.

Ginger, Bonnie and myself wearing some of the tree ornaments. Apparently this was before I discovered the  magic of eyebrow plucking, and letting my hair go naturally curly.

This is one of my favorite photos ever taken of myself, at Tyler State Park. I think that I am trying not to throw up due to the liter of wine I drank the previous evening.

Dear baby Jesus, Allah, Buddha, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster: 
Please make my belly look this good again some day. And let me appreciate it that time around.
Thank you. 
Love,
Katy

Aww. My old driver’s license. I looked so young!! I suppose that’s because I was.  Note the fancy eyeliner and blood red lipstick. I do believe I am wearing a Cure shirt.

One of my best friends when I was little was a boy named Jesse. He was the grandson of my grandma’s next-door neighbor/best friend, Fran. Fran’s family and my family might as well have been blood relatives, we were so close. I only saw Jesse in the summers when I would get to visit Grandma for a month or so. We had all kinds of fun driving his go-kart, building hammocks, exploring the woods, swimming in the sound, setting off fireworks, and building crab traps (and taking out the leaky rowboat to set them, and actually catching crabs!) (not in THAT way, we were like 8 years old, get your mind out of the gutter!). During the school year we’d write each other letters, often in “secret code” so my little brothers couldn’t decipher them. Our secret codes were like a=1, b=2, c=3 and so on, but we sure thought we were being clever! You can click the letter below for a larger, more legible version.

Oh. My. God. We looked so YOUNG! This is me, Margret, and Kathryn on Earth Day 1991. We were 18. What the hell did I do to my hair? Good lord.

I had a very strange bad dream a couple of nights ago. It involved an observation platform, a buffalo nickel, orange jello, and a bad attitude.

Last night I fell asleep early, and when Doc came and lay down next to me to tell me goodnight, I was so deep into sleep that I had no idea who I was, or who he was, and I panicked… but I was still mostly asleep so I couldn’t move. It was probably only a few seconds but it seemed like an eternity until I could move or speak, and I was so confused that I distinctly remember saying “Mom?” It was simply what came out of my mouth, and as I said it I realized that it made no sense. Right at that moment I woke up enough to realize what was going on and immediately calmed down. But I don’t remember ever being that disoriented before.

I haven’t been sleeping very well lately. Maybe that’s related.

So today I heard from my friend Clint Shepherd from college. I came across his e-mail address on a public directory and decided to write him a few days ago, thinking that it may very well not even be a valid address anymore. But lo and behold, he got my letter and wrote me back! He is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met — so genuinely nice. He makes you feel like you’re his best friend, even if you’ve only just met. I feel sad that we lost touch. He was supposed to go to New York City with me and Ian right after we graduated, but that didn’t work out somehow and we just lost each other. He has lived in Italy, Hawaii, and now Tahiti — and god only knows how many other places inbetween!! Not that I’m jealous or anything… :)

I keep having these crazy dreams. For the last two nights I dreamed about Wichita, Kansas. Dreaming about Wichita, in and of itself, is not that weird if you consider that we have family there, but two nights in a row, about a specific city? Hmmm.

Anyway, last night I dreamed that Doc and I were walking around downtown Wichita at night, and we went into a tiny little pub with neon signs in the windows. By “tiny,” I mean that it was maybe six feet by twelve feet in size. Plus, it was sort of a split-level thing, because we walked up about four or five stairs from the street to the door. The ceiling was very low, because I couldn’t stand up straight. To the right of the door, there were a couple more stairs to a tiny raised area where the two booths were. There was just enough room to squeeze between the front windows and the tables. We sat down in the back booth, which had a tiny passageway running behind it to some back part of the place. A warm yellow glow was coming from around that corner, and there was a sheet across the doorway. As soon as we sat down, Hujefa and Surekha (from college) walked in the door and sat down at the table with us. Except as soon as she sat down, I realized that it wasn’t them. It was actually Tulika (who looked like a cross between Surekha and Subha) and Upendar. Upendar went back down the little stairway to get some drinks, and the first thing she said to me was “How was your Christmas?” And I realized that 1) she had a very thick Indian accent, which in real life neither Surekha nor Tulika has, 2) it seemed a little strange that she didn’t say hi, how are you, long time no see, or something like that — just straight into the holiday question, as if we had been keeping up all these years and that was a normal thing to ask; and 3) that Tulika never liked me much anyway, so why would she want to socialize with me now? And I barely knew Upendar. Upendar came back with drinks for the two of them, and water and coke for me and Doc, and I tried to introduce them to Doc but couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

Then later, driving somewhere, we were stuck at railroad tracks where the gate arm was down but no train was coming. Instead of driving around the arm and over the tracks, I wanted to turn around and find another way. There were some scary looking guys surrounding the car and they climbed on top of it and on the hood and started pounding and yelling, and making the car spin around like it was a toy top. Doc told me to just ignore them and pretend they weren’t there, and they would go away.

Night before last, I dreamed that we were again in downtown Wichita after dark, but this time waiting at a bus stop with a bunch of other young people. The girl sitting next to us, who had dark hair and was dressed in a short dark velvet dress, told us that she played lead guitar in a band called Slayer, and that they were really awesome, and that we should come check them out that night. Doc asked them why the musicians in this town all drove vans and not school buses. She said that it was just because they all had vans, no reason. But he kept asking, like it didn’t make sense to him that they would all use vans instead of school buses. She hopped up and went over to a box truck that had parked on the corner and told us to come listen to her show later.

When I was a freshman at Austin College, my roommate Kathryn was dating Scott Conner’s roommate Dan, so the four of us would hang out together a lot. Scott had a really weird sense of humor, which was part of the reason that I liked him, and he was always pulling pranks and practical jokes on people.

On Halloween of 1990, I decided to pull a little joke on Scott. Earlier in the day, Kathryn and I had gone to Kroger, where we bought three boxes of white plastic forks in preparation. Forks were all we needed for this prank — forks, and luck.

We waited until almost midnight, then snuck out the side door of our dorm and loitered for a few minutes, trying to get up the nerve to cross the street. Finally, we crouched low and dashed across Grand Avenue to Dan and Scott’s house, forks in hand. We lurked behind some bushes in the side yard, and could tell by the noises coming from inside that there was some sort of party going on.

We figured that we were safe for a while – no one would hear us over the din of the party. So as quickly as we could, we forked Scott’s yard. We took all 72 white plastic forks and stuck them, tines up, into the ground. There were forks damn near everywhere, because it was a pretty small yard. As my final hurrah, I snuck up onto the front porch and put a fork in the mail clip next to the door. And then we took pictures — with the flash! I was so certain that someone was going to come out the front door and catch us, but luck was with us that night. We ran as fast as we could back to our dorm.

The next day, I ran into Dan on campus, and he told me that Scott walked outside that morning and just stood there, completely speechless, totally dumbfounded by his front yard which was now inexplicably covered in forks.

Three days later, I received an unmarked oatmeal container in my campus mail box. Inside were 72 white plastic forks, covered in dirt.

I do not remember how Scott found out that Kathryn and I had done the forking. Most likely, we were so pleased with ourselves that we confessed. Scott had pulled a lot of pranks on other people, but it was very rare that someone could actually “get” Scott. And we got him!

Scott never forgot the prank, because for years afterward, every time he went on a trip he sent me a postcard or a photograph that had a fork somewhere in it. He’d write a note on the back and substitute the word “fork” somewhere in every sentence!

Scott died on March 30, 2002. He had been fighting Hodgkins’ Lymphoma, a form of brain cancer, for more than two years. He had been doing better after stem cell therapy, but succumbed to an infection.

Scott was a dedicated photographer, and his family is in the process of putting together a book of his favorite photographs. They asked me to contribute some of the fork pictures that Scott took, along with the story of how it all started.