Day 3:

This is a photo of me and my best friend Cynthia from the Corpus Christi Caller Times newspaper. We called ourselves Cyn and Jen and were inseparable from around third grade through junior high, when the Keillors moved to the Virgin Islands.

The photo is when we were both in Aladdin and the Forty Thieves. We were slave girls and did some sort of slave girl dance. We also had to be in a crowd scene and mutter "bread and butter, rhubarb, rhubarb, bread and butter" because that made for good crowd sounds.

Our parents were great friends, and very involved in community theater. I think they were the reason my family got involved at Little Theater Corpus Christi (LTCC), too. Cyn and I did childrens theater classes and shows, and my folks did things like run the box office or tech work. Cyn folks were actors and in many of the adult theater productions. I remember being jealous when LTCC put on Peter Pan, and George Keillor was a pirate, Helen was Tuptim the Indian princess and Cynthia was a little Indian.

She and I were also both obsessed with drawing. We created comic books with only one copy available. I helped her stick glow-in-the-dark stars in her room just like you! I honestly don't think I have ever had another friend that shared so many of my primary passions since Cynthia.

I found a whole stack of these large capital Ms the other day, one for each major holiday:

They say Dorothy Ernst on the back, but no date. In the context of the other stuff in this box (which I will get to later on) it has led me to the realization that Gramma had a great visual eye! I had always thought of her as being much more musical and verbal, but there's lots of stuff in here thats quite sophisticated visually.