Songs, Games and Imaginary Names, Part II

OK, sorry it has been so long since I've posted here. But I will take a few moments here to recall some funny stuff from that year. Sheila has told you about our names for Mr. Coffin's children, and she hinted toward a story about Cliff, our neighbor.

Here's the deal with Cliff: He had a vaccuum.

Really, that's the only connection we had with him. With five of us girls, plus an assortment of boyfriends and temporary roomies, we really didn't have much need to socialize within our apartment complex, but what we did need was a vaccuum. We didn't have one.

The funniest part, though, is that when I mentioned this to Sheila last summer, she had forgotten the vaccuum element to the relationship. That tells you how important house cleaning was to our household of domestic goddesses.

I think we met Cliff, an older, graying man, when one of us was taking the garbage to the dumpster at the same time he was. Pretty soon, we were borrowing his vaccuum regularly--or at least every couple of weeks or so.

All we knew about him was his first name, he appeared to be married, and the two of them appeared to have a teen age daughter who was a wild-dressing, crazy-haired punk rocker.

The rest, we made up. Like their last name: "Hanger." Cliff Hanger. His wife, whom I don't believe we ever spoke with, we dubbed "Clothes." Clothes Hanger. Pretty stupid, actually, but it made us laugh, and that was really all that mattered. The punk rocker daughter with the loud music whenever she could get away with it? "Head Banger." Head Banger Hanger. Why? No idea.

Oh, but the best fun we had with imaginary names was naming Sheila and Stuart's own future progeny. You can do quite a bit with the last name of "Chew." I recall Sheila's first child was to be named, "ThatswhatIlikeabout." After that, there was Miss, who might in turn name her own daughter after herself and would turn out to be Miss Chew II (pronounced Missed You, Too). Of course there was good ol' "Ah," and "Isthat."

You can imagine my disappointment when the names Sally and Samuel were assigned to the first two children. I still hold out hope for "ThatswhatIlikeabout Chew."

Good times, indeed.

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Other than making up names for people real and imagined, the game that I best remember us playing was "Lazy Butt Volleyball." In this game, we each sat on a different piece of furniture around the living room and passed a volleyball from person to person, but no one was allowed to get up from their seated position--even if the ball went out of our reach. As soon as the ball bounced onto the floor, the game was immediately over.

Sounds simple, but oh, it was such a challenge. For you see, we only played this game when we all had studying to do and no one felt like working--it was our favorite method of procrastinating (or was walking to In-N-Out our favorite method? Hmmm... no it must have been L.B. Volleyball--we were generally too broke for In-N-Out)--but when the ball hit the floor, the game was over and we had to get back to work; that was the rule.

I swear, that game could have helped the olympic team train. The effort we put into perfect passes and the contortions we stretched our bodies into to keep the ball from going dead--without moving out of our seats, of course--it was truly amazing. We all became much better volleyball players that year, I'm sure of it.

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As far as songs go, I don't remember the one Sheila posted below. I mean, I remember the song, but I don't remember it being "our song."

The song I do remember was from the Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie. Remember that Sheila was dating Stuart (Stu).

You know it's true...
Everything I do,
I do it for Stu.

Loudly. Often. I remember it well.