2001-10-18 - 11:19 p.m.

"She memorized every pencil crayon color in the box. Her blue-green eyes compliment the burnt sienna in her locks."

That line, from "Life, In a Nutshell" by the Barenaked Ladies has always reminded me of Sarah. Since the very first time I heard it.

See, before Sarah, in my mind, was even a face, even a quiet, timid girl with dreamer's eyes sitting at the base of the Knox Hall television room, draped in white and purple and pink, she was a name. Just a name.

When I got to the University of Maine the summer of '98 and was dropped off by my mother at Knox Hall, I was informed that one of the new Upward Bound students that summer was going to be attending the MSSM with me that fall. That's when I heard Sarah's name for the first time. Nothing more than a passing comment. A "good to know" moment that just fit in with various other "good to know" moments that packed those first few days at the program.

I remembered her name later, partially because every few days or so, Becky would ask me if I'd met her yet, which I hadn't.

Then one day, on an email conference that all of the Upward Bound students had access to, a debate started between Sarah and I over whether magenta was a purplish or a pinkish color. A physics class I'd just completed a couple of months before had gone over optics at the very end of the year, and one of the basic concepts we'd learned was that red light shone over blue light made magenta light, something I remembered very distinctly looking purple. I even used the email program's text color display to make sure we weren't talking about the same color and just describing it differently. Nope, she did the same thing, our magentas were very distinctly different colors.

Now, to most people, this shouldn't have mattered much. But she was disagreeing directly with something I was taught in my physics class. There was no was I had this wrong. At the time, and even still a little now, I was almost fanatical about my understanding of physics. Not great at remembering formulas and equations and such, but dammit, I knew how stuff worked. And I knew I was right there.

What I didn't realise at the time was that I was debating with someone who was probably just as passionate about her arts and colors as I was about my physics. This argument went on for a lot longer than it should have, until finally we came to the conclusion that the two were probably defined differently by physicists and artists. (what? *gasp* Scientists and artists disagreeing on something? Never!)

And that was the end of our little debate. Simple as it was, I was most intrigued by it. We didn't converse again, email or otherwise, until the improv comedy workshop where we met face-to-face for the first time. For a while after that, there was little more between us than casual conversation. But that summer I went to the Ames department store in Millinocket to buy the Barenaked Ladies' "Stunt." I was shocked to find that they didn't have it, but had "Rock Spectacle" instead. So that's what I bought. That was when I first heard "Live, In a Nutshell," and the line. And the first time I heard Steven Page singing "She memorized every pencil crayon color in the box," I immediately thought about the girl I'd met over a month before, clad in purple and pink, but first talked to while arguing about those very colors.