I’m biding my time at home, and without much to stimulate me (outside of the new Robert Pattinson/Taylor Launter pull-out poster from Twist magazine now adorning the ceiling above my bed), I find myself shuffling through the boxes gathering dust in my closet and digging out artifacts that remind me of a more carefree time in my life.
This is one I couldn’t just glance over, chuckle at, and toss to the side. This gem, I believe, I owe to my best friends in West Hartford to publicize. There aren’t many people who can say, at age 22, that the friends they made in grade school are still the folks they pass the time with over a ballgame and a beer. We are an anomaly, and I am grateful for that. We were, and still are, a bunch of talented, creative, fun kids – the kind of kids who would write, direct, and produce a 10-minute PSA when the rest of the class squirmed in their seats all morning aching for cafeteria pizza.
No one was surprised when our teacher gushed with praise. Or when our classmates all hated our guts out of jealousy (though that was nothing a little recess redemption couldn’t rectify.)
After the filming, Ash grew an additional inch and a half to an adult height of 4’10″. She didn’t lose a stitch of her badass attitude. Alli flipped her wig (literally, thank God!), and still rocks out on the marimba. During production, we lost over a dozen construction paper cigarettes to the Connecticut springtime wind, and Linnea became an expert at hand-rolling. She has yet to find an outlet for her skills post-grad. The three woodland animal costumes made cameos in Wolcott Elementary School productions for the next decade. And perhaps, most importantly of all, after being visited by the Ghost of Marlboro Past, there isn’t a smoker in the cast.
This post is dedicated to the memory of Jenny Hamilton (Aug. 11, 1987 – Oct. 24, 2004).
