Capturing Characters

Note: This was written months ago, revised and I thought posted a week ago and now finally making it to screen.

So, a girl walks into a coffee shop. That girl is me. I meet another girl. She is gorgeous. She is talking with a fellow caffeine-drinking acquaintance about the Twilight series but he is unfamiliar so I wriggle my way into the conversation, true to my baby-child roots. It just so happens that I was persuaded last evening to join Laura and her family at the new Eclipse movie, so today, I have the opportunity, I have an opinion and I swoop in.

“Did you go see the new movie last night?” I asked. She had not. I told her it was creative, better than the others and a tad risqué which she liked. We went our separate ways, I to my computer bar and she 3 feet away at hers. Now, because I am, in fact, the youngest , I have excellent and time-tested eavesdropping skills. So, when I heard the woman’s friend ask “Is she (he gestured at me) “your first stranger of the day”, I felt an “old-school” exhilaration come over me. Not only had I heard their conversation, but they were talking about me!!!

A brief inquiry and I found out that she too was on a new blog adventure. She is meeting new people (one per day), writing about them and currently she is needing to know what to call me, because, “how could I not write about someone with such a beautiful smile?” I tell her my name and her friend smirks because, I happen to have a rather famous one. Then he asks me a lovely question: “Has it been mostly good or mostly bad living with that name?” I smile. It has been mostly good I say, thinking of all the cute boys who have lingered with me just a moment longer because they have an enduring junior-high crush on my celebrity namesake.

Enter cute boy who has a crush on said namesake. Gorgeous woman’s friend introduces me to the new guy who upon hearing my name, not only gets the shakes, but tells me that if I dress as the other Kerri he will let me into a show that he is doing for free. This sounds creepy as I type it out, but trust me he was just a nice kid doubly struck by my own beauty and the memory of my name- sharer in her younger days.

“This all must be great fodder for this writer woman”, I am thinking to myself excitedly. I loved that she was watching my every interaction as though I was the star of my own reality show. (Did I mention that I am a youngest born?) But all attention-whoring aside, I was impressed with this lady having committed to this character-capturing endeavor –just as any good writer needs to do. And just like any good neurotic writer would do, I was counting down the minutes until she finished typing and I could see how she would present me to the world.

Would I be described as pretty? Witty? Charming? Needy, Intimidating, gag-inducing? After what seemed like an eternity, she stopped typing and it was clear that her work was done. Looking at her website my worst fears were realized. She didn’t call me fat or dull or slovenly. She did not call me anything at all.
That little trollop skipped me. I was her character of the day and she had absolutely nothing to say about me. And I know that in the other ways the day was marvelous. After all, I had gotten offered free tickets as you’ll remember—just so long as I show up to an event that I have never heard of, in the previously agreed upon fantasy outfit. There is nothing fishy there, right? All on the up and up?

Nevermind, though. The horror of being passed over is always going to trump the flattery of a perfect stranger asking you to role-play for them at a public event. I think that is a generally agreed upon principal, right?

But guess what, the joke is on that gorgeous girl because I have my own blog and it is a place where everybody knows my name! You all would write about me if I was your stranger of the day, wouldn't you? Maybe if I dressed up as that other Kerri?