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Savor the Comic, Unplug the Drama (SCUD) Day
 
Uh-oh.
 
Fatima is in Salt Lake. And she wants to hang out.
 
Good lord, what am I going to do? I’d love to see her again, but since we first met my Spanish has rusted like a truck on a hillbilly’s lawn, and I don’t have time to brush it up. Conversing that way is awkward, and she’s about the same in English, so I foresee a lot of embarrassment and confusion if we do anything.
 
Plus, I want to figure out something fun to do. I like Fatima. I have IM’d off and on with her over the years since we met, and to this day she remains the only person I have ever smuggled into a hotel room, and that’s got to count for something, right?
 
Yeah, got you with that last one, didn’t I?
 
All right, all right. I’ll elaborate. 
 
Five years ago, in my sophomore year of high school, I played the bass. Not the cool guitar-hero electric bass, either, oh no—I played the big honking stand-up, the bull fiddle, the kind of instrument whose case could be used to smuggle dead bodies.* In the school orchestra, I was the one way up in the back with a black-haired bow bitterly counting the rests till my exciting eight-measure part in Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
 
And I was into it enough that in December, a week or so before Christmas break, I accompanied the orchestra—fifty kids aged 15-18, plus four harried chaperones—on a trip to a music festival in Chicago.**
 
I cannot possibly describe the three days we spent there—the whirl of music and hurried sightseeing and lack of sleep. By the time we boarded the plane back to Phoenix, where we would switch to one to Salt Lake, I had gained a bit of a reputation as a party girl because I’d ordered a cup of Earl Grey tea with my breakfast and my pajamas weren’t flannel. (It takes very little to beat a primarily Mormon crowd of orchestra geeks.) However, I was exhausted, and looking forward to getting home, where I planned to sleep through the break.
 
On the plane in Phoenix, one of the girls asked if she could switch seats with me. Since I make it a policy to always honor that sort of request,*** I switched and wound up next to Fatima, who was about my age, flying up from Mexico to visit her brother in Salt Lake. She didn’t speak any English, but I wound up using my Mad Spanish Skillz to strike up some exciting small talk. We chatted away through the flight, and then the pilot came over the loudspeaker and said that the weather in Salt Lake was not conducive to landing, and we’d be stopping in Vegas for the night. Some of the kids with less foresight cheered, the tired ones booed, and Fatima looked at me in alarm. When I explained what he’d just said, she looked even more alarmed. “What will I do?” she asked in terror.
 
And, because I was picturing what it would be like to be in an unfamiliar place and have my plans thrown out of whack and no way to communicate with anyone to be taken care of, I had the simplest answer possible—one that made me the bane of the chaperones for the rest of the trip.
 
“Come with us!” I told her.
 
The airline was kind enough to find a hotel where fifty-plus exhausted orchestra teens could spend the night until the next flight. As we deplaned, I told the school principal, who had come with us, about this girl who didn’t speak a word of English and needed a hand. I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t “You’d better stick close to her, then!” She rose greatly in my esteem for that.
 
So Fatima came with us to the Hampton Inn. We had a dinner comprising whatever we could find in the 7-11 next to it, and then she, two other girls who couldn’t understand a word she said, and I slept in one room until the next morning, when we went to Salt Lake and united her with her family. We exchanged contact information, and since then we’ve chatted off and on over IM (and she’s learned a bit of English).  How’s that for making friends and influencing people?
 
And now she wants to hang out again, which means I need to call her.  Spanish ability, away!
 
 
*Ironically, this was because I took it up in fifth grade, when I was the tallest in my class. Ah, how times change.
 
**The good news was that basses are so big and unwieldy that the festival lent us some, so unlike the poor cellists we didn’t have to wrestle our giant instruments through baggage checks.
 
***The reason is actually given in another funny story. Remind me sometime.

Date: 2007-07-09 12:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] chibicharibdys.livejournal.com
Wow, that's an awesome story.

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