Thanks to Bink

During my sophomore year in college I usually carried a steno notebook around with me. This was surely because of the influence of the writing classes I was taking, in which we were encouraged over and over to "write what you know" and the nature of the acting training we were getting in the theater department. I wrote down random thoughts and my friends did too. Sometimes people would draw pictures in it (but not me, usually, as I was - and am - more comfortable with words).


Before the era of the coffeehouse, there was really only one place to go in Tacoma if you were under 21, and that was Denny's. My friends and I spent a lot of time there, sometimes with our books and notes, but usually eating fries and cake and drinking sodas and talking and teasing each other. In that period when I was bringing along my little notebook, Bink and I went up there one night. I was wearing a blue denim skirt with buttons up the front that I really liked, and somehow we wound up talking about it.