And You Can Be My Cowgirl

To thank Colleen for her work on the reunion, the only thing I could think of doing is publishing a Sadie Hawkins picture. I think it's from our junior or even sophomore year. I don’t know who the guy is; I was afraid that if I mailed this photo to Colleen to ask his name, she’d forbid me from posting it even though she looks beautiful, as always.

Colleen married some guy from the class of 85. (Okay, bad joke: who doesn’t remember Phil? He practically ran the school.) I've learned just a little about her life from chats on the phone and from seeing her in January at the first reunion planning meeting. I know that Colleen and Phil lived in several different places (Florida and a couple different places in Tennessee, for example) before moving back to Slidell. They have a daughter named Sydney, and I think she is 6 years old. Colleen also teaches first grade at Bonne Ecole Elementary.

Of the two dozen people who’ve been planning the reunion (finding people, stuffing envelopes, planning the finances, etc), Colleen has been downright inspiring for me since she and I had our first phone call last summer. She’s the reason I bought a new, blank notebook to record all the ideas that spilled out of her brain. Both Colleen and Laura are fantastic chairwomen, organizing and herding this event just as they would a mess of cattle… cattle that are cuddly and friendly with intelligent eyes and a smell so pleasantly uncattlelike that they’d make great props for, say, a Sadie Hawkins photo.