As it goes, I met Tahnie about five years ago. *counting out the years on her toes to verify her age* We were both younger then emotionally than we are now by at least forty years, *laughing lightly* since at that point we didn't have access to books by Francesca Lia Block or Alice Hoffman, and I can't even count the number of times we fought over stupid things, but that's just what teenage girls do.
From my standpoint, you'd understand. However, since you're all out there, I'll have to explain this. It was about four, maybe three and a half years ago that Tahnie first mentioned the Make-a-Wish foundation, and asked for my opinion as to what she should ask for, and at the time she wanted to hang out in the studio with Hanson. [I was jealous like a bastard, you understand. I'm younger than her; it comes naturally.] It took us until 2000 to finally decide what she was going to do, and by then I'd tried everything to either convince her to do it on her own, or that we HAD to do it, because we'd promised each other we would. I'm a very big hypocrite at times, I understand, you don't need to tell me.
... Make-a-Wish interviews take a long time, I'm going to say this now. As it went, however, Tahnie did do a very good job of convincing the people interviewing her that this was the only way it could be done, and that I just had to come along to meet the boys with her. It didn't take a lot of work - she and I have a very odd, close relationship that requires us to do things like walking on roofs of private clubs and taping AOL conversations to our ceilings - and in a whirlwind of events that I can't even be bothered to dissect and explain, it was set for August 10th in Phoenix that we'd get to go see the guys in concert.
Of course, this was when my father decided to get into a motorcycle accident that put him out of commission for the entire summer and eliminate him as my guardian, and we moved the date to something MUCH more convenient; Toronto on September 29. Not only did I get to miss school for all of this, but it was in my favourite city, and so close to home for me.
Barring a hideously long story about hotel rooms on the seventeenth floor [seven is SUCH a lucky number for us] and girls from Syracuse with glitter in their hair that I promised to take presents from to Hanson themselves because they wouldn't get to see the guys, I will say but this one last thing before closing up the very beginning of the bandaid history: this whole thing started with the two of us in a white stretch limousine, with black and pink feather boas and rubber ducks we stole from our hotel bathrooms.
I still have that duck, you know. I tied a white ribbon around his neck and named him Ulysses Amphibian, for reasons that can only be deemed as odd - mostly because of our great Odyssey of this trip to Toronto and the fact that when Taylor Hanson squats in a green shirt he looks EXACTLY like a frog - and I keep him on a shelf above my bed where I can see him every morning. Taylor Hanson may well be married now and I may never get another limousine trip to one of their shows, but what I do know is that the silly little rubber duck with the hotel's name stamped on its rear started everything.
... so it was. we didn't decide to model ourselves after bandaids until the night after the show when we [tahnie's mom, tahnie and i] went to the theatre down the street to see Almost Famous, when we still had that incredible roaring sound in our ears from the crowd screaming and being too close to the amplifiers, and when we were still glowing like fireflies over the song dedication Taylor had given us, but I think it wasn't really something we chose at all. I think it chose us.
next hour: jentay and her now defunct counterpart mercedes
