flashback friday #4

This afternoon my class watched an hour's worth of Little House on the Prairie. Which reminds me. . .Halloween is here. And so are the pumpkin heads. This one circa 1994ish. Taken in Kerry Conroy Messer's bedroom in the Little House in the Ghetto. (Nice cardboard dresser there, Ker. I had one too. It was a blue floral print.)

Let me explain. My senior year (but I was non-graduating at that point), five of us somehow convinced the administration of Tennessee Temple University that we should be able to live off campus. Three of us had previously been RA's and we were ready to be done with the whole "living in the dorm" thing. However, living off campus was pretty much not acceptable unless you were lucky enough to be married or living with family. But somehow, and I'm still not sure how, we were so good giving our pleas that they granted us permission. We were shocked and totally excited about the whole plan.

So Sherri set off looking that summer for the perfect rental house, not too far from campus. She found this little beauty on Bennett Ave., right up the street from TTU's soccer field. It had beautiful grass green carpet, very little closet space, really bad windows, a moldy bathroom, a big slide out back, unfinished cross-stitch projects, a washer and a dryer, a headache cap, and a nice front porch. We lovingly called it the Little House in the Ghetto and we became affectionately known as the Ghetto Girls.

We had family dinner together and took turns cooking. We tried to eat eggplant. We figured out a plan for the household chores. We had dibs on each other's clothes (and I actually fit into some of them!) We had interviews for Jenny's replacement when she left us in December. And our new roommate came with a gun. We hid it with the linens. We cried together while watching ER. We had a funeral for Kerry's fish around the toilet. We laughed all the time. Miss New York came to visit one night. We lit candles and danced to Lifted Up By Angels on the Ashton, Becker, Dente CD and Amy Grant's House of Love album. (And let me tell ya, it was a house of love!!!) We worked out together either in the grass green living room with Susan Powter (stay in oxygen!!!), or we took off down to PowerHouse, where we could do step aerobics for free with the masses of Chattanooga. We lived across the street from drug dealers and watched a bust go down late one night through the slats on the mini blinds on the front door. We also had the most awesome answering machine message ever. Unfortunately, it took up most of the space on the tape, so we never could record very many calls. Ahhh. . .times were good a 1708 Bennett Ave.

This particular day Kerry was expecting a certain someone to come from Virginia for a visit (he shall remain nameless at this time since he is no longer a part of her life), and so we played a little trick on her. We grabbed the pumpkin, stuffed her pajamas with newspapers, and covered up the pumpkin guy. We waited until she came home from work and very excitedly told her he was here. She went running ino her bedroom (where, by the way, Sherri had a life-sized poster of Andre Agassi hanging on the wall) and found Mr. Pumpkin Head instead. I know, we were dorks. But it was a whole lot of fun.

And those Ghetto Girls' reunions. . .fabulous. We need to have another one. It's been way too long.