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My first marriage broke up in June of 1998. Money was definitely tight - my ex-husband and I were both working retail and we had never managed to save much. When we split, we divided up the debt and the money in our account. When I was done paying off my part of the debt, there wasn't much left. I needed a roommate. I met my friend Steve when I directed him in a production of the musical Working. We hit it off right away and spent a lot of time together after the musical was over. He'd mentioned wanting to move out of his parents' house a couple of times. I thought he'd be a good roommate. I wasn't ready to try living with Michael (good thing; despite his initial eagerness to do so, it would have been disastrous). When I mentioned moving in together to Steve, he was ready and willing. It seemed positively providential. Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.' [/Hamlet] We decided to move into a two-bedroom apartment in the same complex in which I was living at the time. We were able to get one only two buildings over. Steve would have to move his stuff from his parents' house, and we would just move my stuff across the parking lot. Steve didn't have much - basically the contents of his bedroom, and a kitchen table and chairs his parents had generously bought us. We moved him in, easy peasy. My furniture wasn't much of a problem. My friend Phil came over (and Michael, I think, and maybe my brother, but I can't really remember) and we carried my bedroom and living room furniture across. Other stuff had been boxed up and moved over during the course of a couple of days. My old apartment was on the third floor, so carrying everything down totally sucked, but luckily the new apartment was on the ground level. It didn't really start to suck until we got to my books. See...I own a lot of them. A whole lot. Hundreds and hundreds. Leaving them til last? Probably a stupid idea. Probably should have done them first. Or staggered between other stuff. But oh no, we had to leave them til last. For some reason we decided to move the books at night. I think we were just fed up with not being fully moved in and decided to just finish it once and for all. Steve had the pictured red hatchback at the time. We thought we'd carry the books downstairs by the armful, dump them in the back, drive them across the parking lot, unload, repeat. Sounds okay, right? Until we made our eleventyhundredth trip down the stairs. About halfway through I decided we'd had enough. I opened up the balcony doors and started tossing books over the edge, three stories down, into a yew hedge. My books! My beloved books! You know how tired I must have been if I started chucking my books three stories down. We were laughing like loons the whole time. I was throwing the books; Steve was fishing them out of the hedge and putting them in the car. It was fast. It was effective. It was fun. I wouldn't recommend it, and I wouldn't hire any moving company that did it - but it certainly made the moving end on a laugh. It wouldn't be the last one Steve and I shared during our tenure as roommates, but it was certainly one of the best.
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