MIMI & MARLENA SUMMER "...this is not a locker room and that's a surfboard --- not a yacht the arrangement's not --- quite --- quite there..." Jane Siberry, "Mimi on the Beach" The summer between my sophomore and junior years I stayed on campus, working a couple of jobs. One involved sitting in the computer room in Upson Hall, explaining to pre- frosh(Cornell's summer start-up program) how to print from their Macintoshes. The other job was delivering pizzas and things for Pudgie's. I bought a '72 Duster for a coupla hundred bucks and I would tool through Ithaca from about 4 in the afternoon to 2 in the morning, usually getting tipped with bong hits and cans of beer. This was also the summer that "Mimi on the Beach" was getting played a lot on college radio stations. Also Suzanne Vega's "Marlena on the Wall." It seemed to me that all the girls on campus that summer were either 'Marlena on the wall' girls or 'Mimi on the beach' girls. I was hopelessly infatuated with a 'Marlena' girl: raven-haired, big, round, proud hooters, a very straight back, and a very fast walk. She'd been in one of my lit classes and an acting class (We kissed during a scene we had to do from 'Key Exchange' and I was certain that she'd lingered. Or was that me?) We saw each other on campus a lot and always exchanged pleasantries but I desperately wanted to make myself a part of her life. So I started doing all the goofy things: memorizing her schedule, eating where and when *she* did, reading the same books *she* read(Boy, did I ever feel silly reading "The Idiot" in Russian, which I still don't know.), the whole nine yards. In the meantime there was this pre-freshman girl from Wyoming, flat-chested, pelican-legged, small-nosed(in short, the kind of girl that makes my heart do flip-flops today), who, it turns out, had memorized *my* schedule, was following *me* around. My freshman-year roommate, who was a summer resident advisor for these high schoolers, had in fact told me this, and cautioned me about getting her pregnant: they'd had six pregnancies already, and it made them look really bad. I got up the nerve to ask the Marlena-girl to the movies one day while we were both eating lunch in the Big Red Barn, which was the only place on campus that I could find horseradish for my roast beef sandwiches(Yeah, but Oliver's is in *Collegetown*). At the precise instant I stood up and began walking towards the Marlena girl, she also stood up and sat down across from the Mimi girl. I sat back down. Next thing I know, these two are *everywhere*, that summer's most ubiquitous couple. No, none of us, we *or* they, ever learn.