The other blonde girl in this photo is my friend Suzanne. When we were in high school we sang duets occasionally in our little country church. Back in those days, I sang alto to Suzanne’s soprano. Our specialty was an obscure song called Dear Jesus, which, like all obscure songs, has lyrics posted on the web.
We weren’t all that good, but we were told we sounded like sisters, which must mean our voices blended well.
This photo was taken after a wedding in the big Lutheran church in town in 1973. Yes, someone was crazy enough to ask us to sing at their wedding. We were used to singing in front of a small congregation of people we knew, so this gig was a little frightening. We had to sing a couple of song from Fiddler on the Roof that neither of us liked with the guitar guy in the photo. He was the bride’s friend from university and we didn’t meet him until the rehearsal, so I don’t remember much about him, but the back of the photo says his name is Fred. The pianist’s name, it says, is Vicki.
We made our matching dresses for the occasion; or at least, I made mine. Suzanne’s mother was a wonderful seamstress so she never had to learn to sew.
I always wanted Suzanne’s hair. Hers was nice and straight and silky, and those were the days when very long and very flat was the only acceptable way to wear hair. I had to brush my hair dry—there were no blow dryers or straighteners in the olden days!—to get it as straight as it is in this photo and it still took only a little bit of humidity to make it go—poof!—into something more like my photo in the sidebar, or worse. Some people without naturally straight hair ironed theirs with a clothes iron, but I was too afraid of split ends to go that route.
I still remember the cup of coffee I had at the reception in the church basement after the wedding. It might have been the best cup of my whole life. It was—wouldn’t you know it!—Swedish egg coffee, also known (appropriately, in this case) as Lutheran church basement egg coffee.
To this day, I love a good cup of black coffee and hate the song Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof. And I’ve made peace with my hair.