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37 All alone. My only companions were my glorious records and the bright stars against the velvet of the Oklahoma sky. I didn’t know who, what, or why, but I had to be on my balcony dancing, hearing music, and longing for something. I felt compelled to be enveloped in that classical space and my longings focused upon a definite person... I just didn’t know who. I had the most terrible adolescent longing for love so I focused that love on the stars. Both my Mother and my Father asked me privately why I stayed in my room so much of the time but I don’t think they really minded so long as I seemed happy. Maybe they were relieved that I wasn’t insisting on running around town with the other high school kids. They certainly knew where I was, which is what they wanted. But as secretive and sober as I was at home, I continued to be the comedienne in school. I really didn’t intend that, but it was just as it had been in grade school. All I had to do was open my mouth and I had the students and the teachers rolling in the aisles. Some of the kids called me the “Lucy” of Rogers High. Maybe I needed that reaction since I was always so dead serious at night. All that dancing at Rogers prepared me for my major at the University of Arkansas, where I enrolled in the modern dance program. After only three semesters I was recalled to Tulsa because of my Father’s illness. Nineteen years old, I’'d decided I was through with school and ready to be on mm. ria HEH I put one of my own paintings on the wall of the studio apartment, all the while thinking, my first picture, my very own, first apartment. A bubbly feeling of pride swelled in my chest. “Tt may not be much,” I twirled to look at the single room, which my landlord called a “studio,” then flopped Barbara: The Story of a UFO Investigator my own. That was the year I left the nest.