The Crop Duster Who Took Me to Prom. Literally.

Notes on Love and Laundry

Hi guys, 

I wrote this newsletter post a few weeks ago, and before I could hit "send" on this latest issue of Love and Laundry, I was attacked by graduation, which completely derailed me for about two weeks. If you have a graduate in your house, I know you understand.

However, I'm happy to report that we survived the many festivities and ceremonies, and I'm finally back at my desk, attempting to write my next book and this newsletter. So here's your latest issue of Love and Laundry, slightly wrinkled, but hopefully still fresh and clean enough to make you smile :-)

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The Crop Duster Who Took Me to Prom. Literally.

My children don't believe me when I tell this story, but approximately 175 years ago, I too was a teenager. 

And even though we did not have Instagram, or memes, or Amazon Prime, we Gen X'ers had Guess Jeans, Def Leppard, and yes, we too had proms.  

As fate would have it, my senior prom fell on the same day as the North Dakota State Speech and Debate Tournament, held many hours away by car in Bismarck, North Dakota. 

To add further difficulty, the prom that year took place on the Dakota Queen Riverboat, a dinner-dance cruise up and down the Red River (one of the few rivers in the world that flows north! Yet another reason to visit North Dakota)!

The Dakota Queen launched in Grand Forks at a specific time, making it impossible to attend the tournament and then show up late for the dance.

Therefore, my state speech qualifying classmates and I faced a terrible dilemma. 

Compete at the state tournament or go to prom?

For me, this wasn't even a choice. I was happy to skip the prom. My Jane Austen reading, Masterpiece Theatre watching self loved speech and debate tournaments even more than I loved Pierce Brosnan and Remington Steele.

If I'd gone to a larger school, I'd have been a theatre kid, but when you only have about 60 students in your entire middle and high school, you don't have enough people to make cliques. We were jocks and cheerleaders during basketball games, but then at half time we ran up on stage, grabbed our instruments, and became band geeks, and then in the spring we all performed in the school play, and became theatre kids. 

But speech and debate tournaments were an opportunity to be with the kind of kids who might have been theatre kids, had any of our schools been large enough to support a clique of this description, so I wanted to go.

I also had no boyfriend, and only nine classmates. The junior class had roughly the same number of kids, and they were all girls. This made scaring up a prom date daunting. Far easier to interpret excerpts from George Bernard Shaw plays in Bismarck instead.

However, my two classmates who also qualified for state really wanted to do both. 

And this is where the crop duster comes in.

I do not remember the name of our Fairy Crop Duster. I only know that he owned airplanes and had a pilot's license and that he volunteered to pick us up at an airstrip in Bismarck and fly us home so we could attend both the state tournament and the prom.

And that's what we did. 

I remember walking across the stage at the awards ceremony, then immediately jumping in a car and heading for the airstrip, a vivid blue North Dakota sky blazing behind it.

In my memory, we sat in the back of the plane where the chemicals were normally stored, and we probably violated all kinds of OSHA/FAA/USDA regulations by doing so. But I also remember the pilot's smile from the cockpit. A capable, can-do guy, dusting the world with kindness from a spray plane.

We landed, and I had about 15 minutes to change into my dress. Then then we were off to the prom, which took another hour of driving by car, because everything is an hour away if are lucky enough to live amidst the peace and quiet of a farm. 

And that was my senior prom. I actually had a great time. My date was handsome and charming, procured for me in one of those if-she-asks-will-you-say-yes-deals brokered by a friend in a quintessentially 

high school-ian manner. I got first place in Dramatic Interpretation and my classmates did really well too, so well in fact, that our tiny rural school ended up beating a bunch of bigger schools in overall points, which brought us great satisfaction.

Fast forward a few decades to last weekend, where we hosted a pre-prom gathering for my son and his friends at our house. Corsages and boutonnieres and pictures on the back porch. As I bought pop and bottled water, and cleaned my house, I felt like I made these preparations not just for my son and his friends, but for the crop duster who fueled up his airplane, flew across the prairie, and made it possible for me to attend the prom.

It also made me think about all the strange and unique talents each of us is given. The ability to fly a plane or plan a party, to write a book or direct a play, to plant a garden or sing a song, and how we can always find ways to use our talents to spread joy, if we're willing to remove a few barrels filled with toxic chemicals from the back of a crop-dusting plane and look hard enough.

It made me think about proms, too. Maybe these rites of passage matter more to us as adults than they do to teenagers, because by midlife we're able to recognize the prom for what it is, an island of memory in an ocean of time, a moment destined to submerge like a lost city, never to come again. 

Proms are stupid

Proms are dumb.

Life is a prom.

Oh won't you come?

-Author Unknown-

I could not find a picture from my Crop-Dusting Prom. I offer instead my senior picture. Please note the height and scale of my 1980's hair. Maybe if we are all very lucky, perms will come back in style again and we can re-live the volume of our youth.

Book News

The audiobook version of Friends with Secrets is currently in production!

A producer from Brilliance Audio reached out a few weeks ago with audition clips. I listened to different audio book narrators as they read excerpts from Friends with Secrets.

Friends with Secrets has two main characters, Nikki and Ainsley, and my publisher is giving each character her own narrator. 

Two of those narrators nailed the voices inside my head, the voices I hear when my characters talk, and I'm absolutely thrilled they'll be narrating the book.

Like many of you, I listen to more books than I read, because I always seem to be in the car, unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry. If you also love to "read" without using your arms or your eyes, you can pre-order Friends with Secrets on Audible now.

I also have one more really, really, really fantastic piece of book news that I can't share yet. More on that...soon!

Until then, may your spring be filled with fresh flowers, good books, and memories of your own prom :-)

Yours Forever in Aqua Net and Guess Jeans, 

Christine