Nicolescu

Thank goodness for Nikki. REALLY. To be honest, I was a little bit worried when she told me she wanted to stay with me for almost the entire second half of my grant period here in Romania. It's one thing to work and share a small apartment with one's boyfriend, it's another to do so with your Best Friend from Second Grade, whom you haven't spent any significant amount of time with since you went trick-or-treating as household appliances in 1979. Nikki and I were Very Best Friends for two years in elementary school. We met when we discovered a mutual talent for flaring our nostrils and bonded over the successive weeks and months by being inappropriately disruptive in Mr. Heron's class. We both agree that these were our most creative, happy and well-adjusted years. There were the experimental dress codes (Nikki would deliberately wear two different shoes, or wear them on the wrong feet; I was fond of alternative hairstyles), the play we wrote and performed for the entire school about cavity prevention, and the outfits made entirely out of paper and staples we crafted in our gifted classes while we were supposed to be doing actual work. We were so obnoxious that the administration made sure to separate us after second grade, so we only saw each other at recess, when we would do back flips and aerials and cartwheels in the grass.

Being weird and good at spelling bees and capable of doing playground gymnastics actually catapulted us to semi-stardom in elementary school, but middle school was a different story altogether. No longer was it cool to touch tongues in public just to gross the other kids out. The multiple ponytails had to be replaced by Aquanet-lacquered flybacks, an unfortunate 80's hairstyle that worked well only on Farrah Fawcett. The humid Florida weather made my flybacks sag like little sticky broken wings. Nikki had swimmer's hair that was a gossamer-like yellow-green. Halfway through sixth grade she wound up transferring to a private school, where she became snobby and popular (at least I thought so) and started wearing lots of makeup. That was pretty much the end of it, until our parents ran into one another about twenty years later and thought we should get back in touch. We were both resistant, thinking that we wouldn't know what to say to each other. But the meeting was strangely natural. Nikki had been in Los Angeles doing theater and acting for 12 years, whereas I was in the process of applying to graduate school in film. We were both interested in social issues and working with kids, and were both disappointed that the bold creativity of our early years had been forced underground by the pressure to conform. We both longed for our youthful confidence and spontaneity.

Nicolescu has navigated Bucharest and my frequent complaining with great aplomb. The day she got here she looked out the window of my ninth floor apartment overlooking the city and said, "Aw. I feel sorry for all the poor little Bucharestians." I said, "Why?" and she said "Because they have to live in these big blocky buildings with no trees." It is kind of a jungle out there. Less intrepid individuals would not be so comfortable exploring and accepting it the way Nikki has. She and I can laugh about things the way we used to when we were making paper suits. This is an inestimably valuable thing when one is attempting to sleep in a mosquito-filled dorm room in a Romanian orphanage after a meal of spam and oily soup, with excited children knocking on the door every two seconds in hopes of getting a glimpse of you in all your fascinating foreign splendor.