Sadie Hawkins Dance

I decided to take one of my favorite songs and turn it into prose.

“He’s so cute!”

“I know.  I think I’m going to ask him to the dance on Friday.”

“Not if I ask him first.”

The giggles left the bathroom as I walked by warming my ears.  I knew they were talking about me.  I looked around to make sure that nobody was around and began playing air guitar was I made my way to class.

I love the Sadie Hawkins Dance!

My next class was English and I had to give a speech.  I spent a couple of hours the night before finding the right joke to start off.  To say that it went over well is an understatement.  Man, I had the whole class laughing.  I was basking in so much light I could have been in a tanning bed.

This was going to be a great day.

After class was lunch.  I got my food and looked around for a place to seat.  There was an open one next to the cheerleaders that I heard in the bathroom earlier.  I decided to go ahead and give them the opportunity to fight over me and sat down.

“Hello ladies.”

There was tap on my shoulder.  I looked up and saw the quarterback of our football team glaring at me.

“Are you looking for a beat down punk?” he asked me.

“I think that’s one thing I won’t be needing,” I said and immediately jumped out of the seat and took off running down the hall outside the cafeteria.  Smart?  Maybe.  Cunning? Oh yes.  I turned around to make sure I’d lost him.  As I turned my head back around I ran smack into someone.  We both toppled onto the ground.  I looked up to see who had gotten in my way and to both my pleasure and embarrassment, it was a girl.  And she was stunning.

Maybe this day wasn’t going to work out after all.

“You’re a smooth talker,” she said.

“Uh…thanks…sorry I ran into you.”

“Come with me to the dance on Friday.”

“Uh…ok!”

“What are you going to wear?”

“My khakis probably.  And maybe a sweater.  Do you like sweaters?”

Creating Worlds - Daily Writer (1/25)

Prompt: Begin creating a world on a single page.  Choose any setting you wish.

It starts in a small town.  There are quite a few buildings but most of them are homes.  There is one store near the entrance gate of the town.  There's also a chicken ranch further in (though the chickens are always getting loose).  The buildings themselves are mostly made of stone with either large leaves or a mixture of straw and mud for the roof (some houses have a combination of both).  There is a small graveyard at the back of the town.  The people mostly work from the home (even the shopkeeper lives above his store).  Though there is some currency floating around, most of the villagers barter with each other to exchange both goods and resources.  They live complacently with their daily lives, not realizing that there may be more to life than this small town or that everyone outside of the town simply sees them as beggars.

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

Music and music videos can be fantastic storytelling devices.  The song "Sleigh Ride" in and of itself is an OK song in my opinion.  I don't hate the song, but it's not one that I have to listen to every Christmas.  Until I heard this version and saw this music video:

On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

The second part of the history of the Fox Ahoy's:


Apparently, my mom had told her mom about my interest in these cookies because when Christmas came and it was time to visit her, my grandmother had a fresh batch of them waiting to be devoured.  Unfortunately, she didn't view the nuts as optional as my mom did, but I enjoyed them anyway and was able to ask her about where she got the recipe.
"I got it from my mother actually."
My eyes got bigger at this revelation and I said excitedly, "So this is an old family recipe!"
"Well, I don't know how old it is, but it is a family recipe."
Images of this recipe being passed down from generation to generation, having arrived on the Mayflower began swirling around in my head.  For all I knew, Moses could have known about these cookies before he parted the Red Sea.  What my nine-year-old mind did know was that I had to get to the bottom of this ever-growing mystery.
Unfortunately, I would have to wait because my great-grandmother lived out in Oklahoma (while my family and I lived on the East Coast)  and we only visited her once a year during the summer and, as stated earlier, this was Christmas.
Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months until it was finally time for our annual trip to the Midwest.  There's not much to do where my great-grandmother lived so I had plenty of opportunities to ask her about the cookies.  The one I took was during a meal.
"Where did you get the recipe for those homemade chocolate chip cookies Grandma?"
She thought for a moment as the magnitude of this mystery reached its climax.  "Oh yes, I remember now."
"Here it comes," I thought with so much anticipation I could hardly stand it.
"I found that recipe on the back of a can of nuts."
"Really?" I asked in disbelief (I was too young then to appreciate the irony).  The recipe began and my quest for the truth ended here, in Medford, Oklahoma with my great-grandmother.

I left that vacation quite disappointed at the lack of grandeur that this story had.  But the cookies continued to be very popular.  Whenever I would return to college after visiting my parents for the weekend my friends would swarm my room in hopes that my mom baked some Fox Ahoy's for me to take back.
But something was still missing.  These cookies were too good to not be epic.  So I decided three things: originally, I wanted the recipe to go the way of Truett's Chick-fil-A and the Colonial's herbs and spices by becoming a secret family recipe.  Then, I realized that it would be better if I shared the recipe and allowed it to be shaped and molded as others brought their own flavors and ingredients to the mixing bowl.
And the third thing?  Well, every good epic needs a story...