Creeping in Basements

This is my friend Chrissy on her wedding day in 2013.
This is my friend Chrissy with Bob and Larry from Veggie Tales.

She is the most ambitious woman I know. She's going to end malaria and prevent premature births and create world peace. 

At Agnes Scott, an all-women's college, the weekend social life was mostly off campus. Chrissy and I were not interested in wild parties or visiting other nearby colleges, so we stayed on campus and tried to entertain ourselves on Friday nights and Saturday nights without spending money. By junior year, we had found our favorite pastime: creeping in basements and attics.

We found crawl spaces with dirt floors, storage rooms of broken toilets, beautiful watercolor landscapes of the college, and empty wine bottles from before we were born. We wrote our names on 110-year-old walls in the attic of Inman (the most coveted dorm, where I lived senior year.)
A photo posted by Kirby Darden (@kirby.darden) on

The best of our sneakiness was senior year, when there was a wedding reception going on in the dining hall on a Saturday night. (As students, we all resented when the dining hall was rented out for a major event, because we had to go eat sub-par food in the student center. Ironically, Chrissy's own wedding reception was in that same dining hall.) We snuck into the basement of the dining hall, and found some unlocked doors into the winding maze of hallways and storage areas. It was alarmingly dingy and gross. 

We found a stairwell, followed the noise, and walked into the kitchen. We thought we could hurry through the kitchen into the side of the great hall and peek at the wedding from behind a curtain. But we were quickly spotted. The staff looked at us very confused (apparently catering staff was not the same as the lunch ladies we knew and loved) and we introduced ourselves vaguely, "Hi, we're students!" And they looked at us like, "Yeah duh." 
We were awkward and feeling embarassed and about to hurriedly leave the way we came, but Chrissy got brave and said, "Let's just keep going." So we kept walking until someone finally stopped us. He was a young-ish man wearing a suit and he said, "HEY girls! Stop. Do you want some leftover cake?"

And we said yes and they gave us a to-go box and we left without actually crashing the wedding. Win-win.

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