That was a level 10 lightning bolt... (powered by chalk)

Although we were really good friends in High School, we were kind of just laying the groundwork for post-HS.  But a some interesting things happened, still.  

Sophomore year we had Chemistry class together.  If I remember, that was the only one for four years.  Mr. Schwartz.  Nice guy.  He would write at the board then wipe the chalk off on his thighs.  The front of his dress pants were perpetually white, which we laughed at often.  Also he would run his hands through his hair, which was slightly greasy, complicating the whole "chalk on the pants" issue.  Sadly D and I weren't lab partners.  No, I had a kid who had to be literally off the boat from Korea.  Exceedingly nice, always smiling, but literally couldn't speak a lick of English.  Have you ever tried to run titrations using only pantomime to communicate?  How we didn't blow up the lab I have no idea.  Darren was very supportive during this trying period, especially since he finished all his labs in half the time that it took me and my partner.

This was also the year we started playing the GREATEST GAME IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION; Dungeons and Dragons.  This lead us to two of our long time friends Vince and Mark, who were are original dungeoning party.  I had already played a couple times prior, and I have NO IDEA how we got on the subject, but I can remember we all took Darren's bus to his house one afternoon, jammed into a back room in his tiny house, snugged up around a table, and started to game.  He had a little pug dog.  I can still do a perfect impression of him, with his little tongue sticking out on one side, panting like crazy three or four times.  Then he'd suck the tongue in, gobble it around for a second and stick it out the other side.  Pant, suck, gobble, out the first side.  Ad-nausiam.  

Anyway, we played pretty regularly through our high-school years and into the beginning of college.  Added a single girl to the group for a while... Denise Konefes.  She was fun.  For some reason I can remember exactly where she lived, as we gamed at her house one time.  (This was about the point in my life where I started to have crazy exact vivid memories of random things.  I've pulled strange events out of my ass numerous times over the years in amazing detail and freak people who were there but don't remember.  ...To make up for it I forget their name.)  There always seems to be a token female in our group, and she is usually the clearest thinker and keeps the rest of us focused, thank goodness.  

Those years of gaming were where I started my first campaign world and we ran those characters for quite a while.  Vince's basement (picking on his poor little brother) ... my dining room... We had one week post-graduation at Turtle Lake with lots of D&D and throwing pennies at each other's car while driving up.  I remember the D&D adventure I ran, a riff on Alice in Wonderland.  We figured out how to make light bounce off the lake in the middle of the night into the fog.  Mark saw his first ever meteor.  That is also when Mark realized he should have done Track and Field; he had his nose to the window one night watching a storm roll across the lake when lightning blasted right in front of the house.  In one motion he leaped all the way across the boat house to the couch on the far side.  

We gamed regularly until Vince and Mark grew up or grew old, one or the other, and stopped playing.  Losers.

Well...  I can't really mean that, because it was those three who started me on the path to essentially everything that matters in my life.  My school years consisted pretty much of wake up, go to school, ride the bus home.  I did NOTHING.  That I never got into ANYTHING through the first 3 years of HS is my one true big regret throughout my whole life.  But then I saw how much fun Darren, Vince and Mark had doing theater.  They inspired me to give it a try senior year.  Damn, was I an idiot to have missed out on those first three years of theater, but at least I snuck in for the last year.  Hung with some amazing people, met my first girlfriend, got to hug Michele Bryant a lot (as friends... sigh).  Now I have everything because of it; Payton, Donna, family, great friends, amazing memories.  All because I watched Darren fence for Romeo and Juliet. 

And most importantly, as I mentioned above, the good times were about to EXPLODE.

Now THAT is a D&D table...