Redheaded Jill

When I was in kindergarten it was the era of Lisa Frank. Neon rainbow unicorns and dolphins were all the rage. When shopping for school supplies I was allowed to get a pack of Lisa Frank pencils. These were the ultimate currency.

Now to backtrack a little, we had a thing called Kindergarten Roundup when I was a kid. The idea was that you could attend a day of “school” to get a feel for what kindergarten would feel like. When I went to kindergarten roundup I had no friends. I didn’t meet anyone who wanted to play with me and I was very shy. So when we played “The Farmer in the Dell” at the end of the day I was the cheese who stood alone. (You know, the end of the song goes, The Cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone… I was the cheese.) Maybe my lifelong dislike of cheese stems from this core memory.

ANYWAY, I wasn’t about to let another Farmer in the Dell situation happen to me again! I was going to make friends! So I took my beautiful Lisa Frank pencils to school on day one and I handed them out to a lot of the girls in my class. My friend Marianne still tells the story, and for a long time she held on to the pencil. We laugh because we ended up going to college together and being suite mates freshman year. I didn’t have cool pencils to hand out in college so making friends was harder. But I can say that I am still friends with at least three of the people who received Lisa Frank pencils from me in 1996.