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I hear from University housing that my randomly-selected roommate is Martha from Buffalo Grove. Great! That isn’t far from where I live! We contact each other and decide to meet at Ace Hardware to shop for school stuff. I am surprised to find out that Martha is a sophomore. (Thought they would put me with a freshman.) She is awesome! We get along great as we shop. We decide on matching desktop fans since our dorm has no air conditioning. While we are in line to pay, I ask Martha if she ever considered rushing. She tells me that she is in a sorority, Kilkenny. I am so excited! While in line I accidentally mention something about being in a show in high school. Martha kind of stops and looks at me and asks me what I mean by “a show.” My heart basically stops because great, I let it out of the bag that I am a nerd who was in shows! I decide I might as well own up since we will be living together, plus, now I know that Gerri and Marietta made it ok and they were in the same shows I was. I told her that I had just finished being the narrator in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and I explain the whole Street Scenes thing. I fully expect her to laugh me out of the store and there goes my chances of being in a sorority. Instead, she tells me that she too was in musicals in high school and now she is in her sorority’s singing ensemble. How awesome is this!
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As summer rolls along, my best friend Cara starts rush at the University of Iowa a week before I do at Illinois. I don’t get a play by play because this is before e-mail and long distance calls were just too extravagant. Cara and her mom went on a recruitment shopping spree and got all new clothes. That made me nervous because I didn’t do that. My mom would have thought that to be way too expensive and impractical. Plus, I had worked at Marshall Fields during high school so I had a pretty good wardrobe.
I moved to my dorm in Champaign the day before my family moved from Illinois to Tulsa, OK. I left my house where I had lived since I was 8 and knew I would never see it again. It was a big transition and if I hadn’t been so clueless I probably would have gotten emotional.
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