Finishing Up Sophomore Year

I had continued being friends with KC, my neighbor freshman year, and she ended up living with a different group of girls that year, all of whom I already knew.  Most of them were taking sign language, although we were not all in the exact same class.  I was over in their room practicing once a week, since that is what I was using to satisfy my foreign language requirement.

The strangest thing happened that spring, when they asked me to help them with something.  They were more excited than usual to see me at dinner that evening, and they all sat down to eat with me, which wasn’t particularly unusual.  But they were definitely looking for something.  It turns out, they were going to do a dance performance to the song “My Boyfriend’s Back” at the talent show that Student Life was putting on that evening.  And they wanted me to be the boyfriend who was returning to avenge his girlfriend’s reputation.

I was not a huge fan of the idea, for a variety of reasons.  First off I don’t really like acting or performing, even though my actual role was minimal, arriving at the end to cap off the song.  On top of that, the comedy of the plan really hinged on the fact that I was the least likely candidate for my role.  And while that was true, I wasn’t a part of the subculture that was concerned about appearances and gaining social position by who I was dating, I wasn’t really sure how I felt about what that ironic portrayal said about me either.  But they were all friends of mine, and a handful of attractive girls can be mighty persuasive, so I eventually agreed.

KC was the ringleader of this new set of roommates as well, so she was the “girlfriend,” while the other four were the “backup.”  The guy she was threatening the whole way through the song was one of their friends, who had the image at least, of being a smooth guy with the ladies.  The girls all started off looking as conservative as possible, with sweaters, long skirts, glasses, and hair in a pencil bun.  And over the course of the dance, all of those were discarded for more “attractive” wardrobe underneath.  I came on-stage at the end, and shove him out of there, to reclaim “my girlfriend.”  My unexpected appearance at the end definitely had the reaction from the audience that the girls were looking for.  But once again, I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about that, and what it said about the general perception of me, even though I was well known and respected around campus.

Anyhow, the performance went off as planned.  I wasn’t real stoked about the way it all worked out, but I survived the experience.  Ironically the other guy ended up being assigned as my roommate when I stayed on campus that summer, but we were both gone a lot, and rarely saw each other.  And then we connected up two years later as potential business partners, when four of us looked into starting a company upon graduation, but he ended up flaking out before we ever really got going.

I planned to stay on campus that summer so that I could do one of two required industry internships as part of the Multimedia program.  I had gotten what was basically an actual job lined up with Paradise FX, the leading company in Hollywood at the time for stereoscopic 3D work.  There were only a couple of main people in the company, and they were loosing their main technology guy for a while, so it was a perfect fit.  But there were still details to work out by the time the semester ended, so I stayed on with the ISS Dept at the school as well, and waited to work things out at the end of May.