One of my favorite songs to sing is "I Enjoy Being a Girl" from Rodgers' and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. Not that I want to be a girl, mind you. Anyway, sometimes there are times when I just really enjoy being a guy. Today was one of those. Not because we rolled the girls out at 0730 with long-stemmed roses and breakfast. Not because we sang "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" for them. Not even because the girls were all beaming. No, ladies and gentlemen. As nice as those things were, what really made my day was taking a stroll around the Quad and finding flyers all over the place that said "Twain Boys - We Love You!"

One of the joys of being a guy in American society is that you're expected to do nice things for girls. (Guys, if you haven't discovered the joy of opening doors for girls, asking them to dances with flowers, or any of the other sundry kindnesses of action and attitude that comprise "being a gentleman," I highly recommend it. Fair warning, though - it's addictive.) Now of course those gifts are their own reward, but that just means that when a girl does something for you ... well. It's enough to send a fellow away from the Quad grinning like a fool the whole way.

So I alluded to a Testimony Valentine's Day escapade in my last post. Here's the whole story:

On Valentine's Day it is traditional to do something nice for the ladies in one's life. Naturally this includes the "eight gorgeous women" (as the song says) of Testimony. The plan we eventually decided on was to buy each girl a personalized stuffed animal. Now, as you might imagine, finding eight different reasonably-priced stuffed animals is hard enough, and nigh impossible when each is supposed to match up with the individual girls. So the Wizard and I ended up selecting eight cute little stuffed dogs, in two shades, one for each section of ladies. Then we purchased some red and white tissue paper and some red ribbon.

After that I took the raw materials back to Twain and whipped up some nametags, which I ran over to Ransom's for him to sign "- The Tmony Guys." That done, I darted back to Twain and commenced wrapping. One of the side-effects of my summers at Zany Brainy is that I can attractively wrap about 90% of the gifts out there. I can't guarantee that it will knock your socks off, but it'll be a fairly professional-looking package. For the puppies I did the obvious thing: using the X-acto knife from my paintball gear box (Dad told me I'd want an X-acto knife in my gear box) I cut slits into the nametags, which I passed a length of red ribbon through. Then I doubled up a sheet of white tissue paper and a sheet of red tissue paper, laid the red on top of the white, and trimmed them roughly square. The dog was then wrapped up in a bulb of tissue paper, white on the outside but red at the top where it opened up, and the whole thing was secured with a red ribbon having the girl's name on it in script and hand-signed, edges curled.

So far, so good. I carted the dogs to rehearsal Tuesday night in a cardboard box covered with my jacket, and after rehearsal was over we took the box outside to distribute dogs to each of the "seven handsome men" of Testimony ... only to discover that we only had seven dogs in the box. Rose's was missing. But I knew I'd wrapped hers up. It had to be in my room. The-person-for-whom-I-have-no-name-yet thrust his keys into my hands and I took off on his bike back for Twain.

It's amazing how fast you can move when you're doing something for a lady. I doubt it was five minutes there and back, dog in hand. And once I got back to the music center, the door was locked! Fortunately the girl who had just locked the door got the picture when I showed her the wrapped dog, and she let me in. Kale wondered why I was shaking and short of breath when we distributed the dogs ... ha! Well, I guess that means we didn't keep them waiting long enough for them to suspect what actually went wrong.

What about roleplaying? Well, I could talk about that now. Or I could finish my Greek so that I can spend my Sabbath in peace. Besides, I'm trying to limit the length of my posts to keep them readable. Next time, ladies and gentlemen.