Cletis and Cletis

Reminiscing about College...
This Top Ten list is dedicated to Carly...who taught me the beauty of top ten lists although I tend to forget that I should number them backwards.

Why Carly and I Were Destined to be Friends...(and other hilarious things we did)

1. "Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket: A Girl's Guide to College Dating." We co-authored this workbook and thought it would be a hit in the BYU bookstore. We made actual eggs and baskets to hang on our wall and included wise advice for distributing eggs with typical dating scenarios in the workbook. We started a small "egg" craze amongst our friends and at one point a guy in our ward said he wanted all our eggs. He didn't really know what he was asking for...but after that his code name became "Eggs for Brains."

2. We went to Wendy's about 3x a week really late at night often waiting til the clock struck midnight on Sunday, making it early Monday morning (We believed in living the letter, not the spirit, of the law). We loved their chicken nuggets for 99 cents. We called them CG's even though their real intials would be CN's.

3. The first time we ever talked was in the JKHB hall before Italian class where I told Carly I thought she was going to get kissed that night and she did. We have been friends ever since.

4. We both call each other Cletis, or Clete for short.

5. We went through a small phase where, instead of talking to each other, we could only sing everything to the tune of "Jeepers Creepers."

6. Once some "friends," in what they thought was a hilarious joke, ransacked our apartment. We THOUGHT it was the girls upstairs and so in the middle of the night we decided to toilet paper and tie cans to their cars. When we were done, we realized we should have used empty cans because we didn't want to damage their cars. So we stealthily sneaked back out to the driveway to fix the situation. Instead of untying the elaborate knots we had made, we just took out the can opener and let the contents of the cans plop onto the driveway.

7. Once I decided I wanted to make a giant pancake that filled the skillet and Carly came in and yelled out, "Cletis, NO!"

8. We bought some really ugly dresses at DI and signed formal contracts that we would each go on a date every week for the last summer of our senior year. If one of us did not go, she had to wear the ugly dress to church on Sunday. Somehow we never wore them, except on the night of the contract signing for picture taking purposes.

9. Italian class:
We made the funniest video ever for our 4th semester Italian class project. In it we dressed alike, were both named Gloria, acted out parts of "Laverne and Shirley" and "The Patty Duke Show" (all in Italian), did Dick Van Dyke kicks and interviewed actual restuarant owners in Provo who were from Italy. We interviewed them on camera with a toy fuschia and lime green "Muppets In Space" microphone that made weird space noises if you shook it that we got from a Wendy's Kid's Meal.

We also had to do a 3 person skit for a project in Italian. We wanted our group to include Adrian because I liked him but we knew Ada who sat next to him would ask him first. She was scary and so we came up with elaborate plans to get him in our group before Ada could. Luckily the teacher announced the project while Ada was on a bathroom break and when she came back she said she wouldn't do the project anyway and would take a 0. I would like to add that Adrian inserted a spontaneous hug between him and me in the skit.

We were both in love with all of our male Italian teachers.

We made a friend from Italian named Christian who started a "girls club" for us where we talked about guys. Months later, to our shock, she confessed she was 38. After class ended and just before Christian's wedding, she told us that our teacher Fabio (Carly and I both thought he was gay at one point, and both loved him at one point) had confessed his love for her. Luckily by that point, we both thought Fabio was crazy. A year after I graduated, I was up in NYC for New Years Eve staying with some friends of a friend and who walked in but Fabio! He was roommates with the friends of my friend and so I ended up staying there in his apt on the couch. Weird, small Mormon world.

10. We often buy "items of mystery" to boost our self-esteem.