YOU KNOW YOU GRADUATED FROM AUSTIN COLLEGE IN 1997 IF:

• You lived in Caruth and couldn’t move your furniture (Nope, we lived in Clyce and could rearrange at will)

 

• You vividly remember the damp and dingy smell in Luckett Hall because there was a Luckett Hall (Oh god yes! Coincidentally, I walked into the bathroom at work one day early this week and immediately thought, “Jesus, it smells like the basement of Luckett in here!” That damp moldy smell is permanently burned into my brain and nose.)

 

• You knew the real SUB and PUB (Sadly, they are only a memory now. Their unique character has been replaced by a big bright shiny new building. I guess it had to happen some day.)

 

• You attended at least one party at Old Settler’s (I’m sure I did!)

 

• You remember getting drunk on $0.37 at Calhoun’s on “Coin Night” (I am proud to say I never once set foot inside Calhoun’s during my entire four-year college career.)

 

• You typed your papers on a Word Processor (sure did! I got one for high school graduation. It was a typewriter with a tiny little readout screen. Practically useless, unfortunately. I typed most of my papers on my friend Peter’s Mac Classic or the Mac Lab in the basement of the science building.)

 

• You know where the Loggia was and snuck food out of the cafeteria and ate it there at least once (Many, times, actually. Apparently the cool kids hung out in the Loggia, a little glass-walled hallway between the PUB and Slater’s.)

 

• You remember the only places to eat in Sherman were City Limits, MGs, Vittina’s, Garcia’s, La Mesa, South Austin Grill and Slater’(What’s MG’s and Vittina’s? La Mesa? Besides a handful of fast food places, we only had City Limits, Denny’s, Garcia’s, Slater’s, the PUB, CiCi’s pizza, which we were THRILLED to get our junior year, and Tracks, that tiny little cheap hamburger place on the other side of 75, across from Dude’s Music and Pawn. We were poor, so South Austin Grill was only for very fancy occasions; see photo and caption below.)

 

• You had to drive past the cemetery to get alcohol in Denison (or Denison was just a liquor store) (Yep. If you were going to “the store,” that meant Kroger. If you were going to “the STO!” that meant the liquor store on the edge of town.)

 

• You were excited when Super K-Mart, Chili’s and El Chico came to town (All these came to town after we’d left)

 

• You saw the Steak Country Cow in at least one parade and remember all the stories associated with it (Oh yes! Loved that cow. Rumor had it that once, many years ago, it somehow ended up on the roof of Abell Library!)

 

• Hickory, Crockett, Purgatory, Luckett, Coffin and Old Settler’s were still standing (Yes to all.)

 

• You had at least one class with either Hugh Garnett, Ken Street, Jane Ellington, Roy Melugin, Jim Ware or Shelley Williams (Jane was one of my favorite professors. So were Peter Lucchesi and Mark Monroe. I think Mark’s still there but Peter retired years ago.)

 

• You remember Harry Smith as President and David Jordan as Dean (Yes and yes. And Tim Millerick was Dean of Student Life. Super cool guy.)

 

• You had to go off campus to Nautilus to go to a decent gym (We weren’t really into working out the way kids are today. That was for athletes. We’d walk the track sometimes or play tennis or racquetball, but we never really missed not having a “decent gym.”)

 

• You remember the 1st season of The Real World (No, I do not. We did not have a TV until our senior year when we moved into an apartment, anyway, and we didn’t really miss not having one.)

 

• You risked your life living in a campus-owned house (Three years in the dorm, and one year in a campus apartment)

 

• You thought Ice Milk was a real treat when they added it to Slater’s (Slater’s got ice milk?! Damn.)

 

• You remember a fraternity named Rho Lambda Theta(Sure do.)

 

• You watched at least one demonstration in the SUB by John White, the pool shark (Hahaha. As VP of the Campus Activities Board, I probably booked the guy at least once.)

 

• You remember the Trust Games at the Lake Campus (We didn’t do trust games as freshman, but Kat and I and our boyfriends and other friends camped at the lake a few times. The cafeteria would prepare a meal for you to grill over your campfire if you told them in advance you were going camping at Texoma… really nice food too, better than you’d get in the cafeteria. Once it was potatoes to bury in the sand and bake, and steak and veggie shish-ka-bobs. And it was part of our meal plan! No extra cost!)

 

• You got injured at some point sliding down the levee (What levee? At the Red River Dam?)

 

• You went to a party at The Hill or Pumpjack (Yes, and yes! Fallout and Tequilafest were other parties I always enjoyed going to. I think the Phi Betas and/or Tri Gams hosted Fallout in the old VA building, complete with cargo nets and nuclear radiation signage everywhere. I don’t think fraternities at AC were like fraternities at many other colleges. They were mostly all nice, sweet guys. No Animal House antics.)

 

• You were allowed to smoke in the PUB (True enough, although I didn’t smoke. I tried to go at times when there weren’t a lot of people there, to avoid it.)

After Kat and I graduated, our families took us and our friends to the South Austin Grill, which was pretty much the only “fancy” restaurant in town at that time. Sadly, this is the only decent photograph I have of that.

Here’s what Kat and I did in the classes we had together! Really, we were both very good students, but sometimes the lectures bored us out of our minds.

When I bought my first computer, in 1996, I believe, I was pretty sure I was going to get a Mac since I’d typed all my papers on Mac Classics in college and been able to use a Color LCII in my office on campus for doing flyers and other layouts for publicity-related items for the Campus Activities Board, of which I was a vice president. Actually, learning Pagemaker on that computer was what got me my foot in the door at my current job! Anyway, I asked my new boyfriend Doc to help me do a comparison of a few Mac models that I thought I could afford. I bought the Performa 6205CD and an extra 8MB of RAM, and I think that I paid a total of something like $2700 for the whole shebang. Check out those sexy specs!

Shortly after college graduation, I went to the Stonewall 25 Anniversary celebration in New York, marching in support of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights. It’s a very long and complicated story, but I mostly had a fantastic time. I saw Laura Branigan in a street concert, visited the Statue of Liberty, participated in a parade, visited Fallingwater and the Hershey’s Chocolate Factory, and saw more of the Midwest and East Cost than I had ever seen before or since.

I visited Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Finland, and a few other Eastern European countries as part of a month-abroad course I was lucky enough to be able to take in 1993. On paper, we were supposed to be studying these countries’ new economies after the fall of the Soviet Union, but in reality it was just a fun cultural experience (I’ll post my journal here later, I think). We had to turn in a ten page paper at the end of the class, which wasn’t a whole lot of work for one month. A few nights ago I found a small stack of currency from some of these countries. Being a poor college student, I think if it had been worth more than about $10 I would have exchanged it on my way back into the States, but I decided to keep it as a souvenir. So when I found it the other night, I wondered how much it was worth these days. A quick calculation on exchange-rate sites told me that my 11,650 Polish zlotys were worth more than $5,000.00 US. WHAT?!! That can’t be right. Can it?? Has the value really gone absolutely nuts like that in the past 15 years??! Maybe it has!! Where can I take this money to be exchanged?! Is this too good to be true? It has to be too good to be true. Right? Hmm, maybe I should do a little more digging… and… DAMN. Turns out in 1995 Poland revaluated their currency, to where 10,000 old zlotys were worth one new one. And one new zloty is worth… drum roll please…. 44 cents US. Oh well. I guess I’ll keep the bills. They are really beautiful, although I think that’s Copernicus on the 1,000 bill, and did he get hit with the ugly stick, or what? Talk about your baaaaaaaaad haircuts.

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.

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… :)

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.

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.