I Peaked in Kindergarten

In Southeastern Pennsylvania folklore, the Bogwitch is a legendary creature, known to resemble an insecure fifteen-year-old girl. Some witnesses describe her as unwilling to take her hair out of a ponytail, while others report that she is, in fact, unwilling to take it out of a bun. It is considered an omen of bad crops or impending bacne if one spots a pair of Bogwitches cantering through the woods.

The first alleged sighting of a Bogwitch was reported by Temperance Umble (née Rumspringa) of Intercourse, PA in the summer of 1934. She told local police that she had seen the haggard, pale visage of an uncomfortable woman with scraggly eyebrows, but her claims were quickly dismissed as a hysteria brought on by too much jazz music.

Over the next several decades, however, there were no fewer than six hundred sightings of the Bogwitch in the Pennsylvania River Basin area. It wasn’t until 1974, however, nearly forty years to the day of Temperance’s initial sighting, that pasta heiress Citronella Farfalloni managed to snap the infamous “Farfalloni Photo” (above). Farfalloni was travelling on a charitable pasta mission to bring rigatoni to the Pennsylvania Amish, when she came across that same haggard figure. It was only once she developed her film that she noticed a second figure: a stout, greasy child wearing a luminous headband.

Her photo was published in Amish Legends Monthly, sparking a national obsession. Faked images of the Bogwitch circulated wildly, inspiring the Broadway musical Bogwitch!, which was later adapted into the feature film Annie Hall. The Bogwitch is still celebrated today with a biannual Bogwtich Festival, which features the world famous Bogwitch Inner Beauty Pageant.

It was Christmas Eve, and Gabby and Charlotte were just toweling off after their daily swim in their pit of gold coins. They settled in with their plain rice cakes and their chamomile tea to begin work on their latest post: “Tube Jeans: An In Depth Exploration of Charlotte’s Poorly Fitted Pants, 2009-2011.” Before they began, however, they thought they would unwind by laughing at how unfortunate their friends looked back in middle school.

Gabby’s index finger was poised over the left arrow key on their friend Hannah’s profile picture, when suddenly she heard a mighty rattling of chains. 

Clank.

Clank.

The two callipygian girls whipped around, and could scarcely believe what stood before them. It was a fox with the bearing a man, fitted with a jaunty feathered cap and green tunic. They both recognized him at once as Robin Hood from the 1973 Disney flop Robin Hood, for this was the anthropomorphized cartoon who had sparked both of their sexual awakenings. However, today the foxman was hung about with great, rusty chains.

“It’s Robin Hood, but the fox one from that movie!” Charlotte exclaimed.

“No, it’s only an undigested bit of rice cake. Bah humbug or whatever,” Gabby replied.

“GIRLS,” said the phantom, “BECAUSE OF YOUR JUDGEMENT TOWARDS OTHERS, YOUR GREED, AND YOUR NEGLECTFUL FLOSSING HABITS, YOU WILL BE VISITED BY THREE GHOSTS--”

“I flossed last week!” said Gabby.

“LIES!” cried the vulpine vision, “YOU SHOULD BUY A TURKEY FOR THAT SICK LITTLE BOY DOWN THE BLOCK. OR AT LEAST LET YOUR FRIENDS USE YOUR NETFLIX PASSWORD ONCE IN A WHILE. HEED MY WARNING, LEST YOU END UP IN CHAINS LIKE ME!” 

And with that, Robin Hood the fox from the 1973 Disney flop Robin Hood was dragged back to hell, where he belonged.

The two rubenesque girls shivered in fear, but already the first of the night’s apparitions had begun to take form before their very eyes.

“Behold!” cried the ghosts of Christmas Past, who appeared to them like two adorable little girls. “Behold us, the shadows of who you once were!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said one of the little girl ghosts, gazing out at Gabby and Charlotte with alarm. “Does that mean we’re going to look like those two living goblins when we grow up?”

The cherubic little ghosts began shrieking, and dissolved at once.

“Were we... supposed to learn a Christmas lesson from that? Are we some sort of Scrooge McDuck figure?” asked Charlotte.

“It’s not even Christmas in that photo. They’re wearing shorts,” said Gabby.

Already, however, the air before them began to shimmer, and soon they were confronted with the Ghosts of Christmas Present:

The vision appeared like two wretches, beaming at each other with deformed grins. The two phantoms spoke at once: 

“Yikes,” said the taller spirit, “Do I really look so haggard?”

“Literally,” said the bespectacled spirit, “That chapstick really brings out my dolphin teeth.”

The two cruel spirits then vanished in a gale of insecure laughter.

“Honestly, that was rude, but I respect their constructive criticism,” said Gabby.

The room now grew cold. The blinds began to shake, and a thin film of ice crept over Charlotte’s lava lamp.

“IT IS I, THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS FUTURE.”

Two horrid visions were taking shape: strange creatures, somewhat like teenage girls, but oily of skin and frizzy of hair. They had metal bars encircling their yellowed teeth, and both gave off waves of low self-esteem.

“Stop, stop!” cried Charlotte. 

“We’ve never looked worse!” shrieked Gabby.

But already the demons were shifting their shape, morphing into something more terrible still.

“LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YOU. YOU GIRLS ARE HANGING ON BY A THREAD.”

“SERIOUSLY, BUY A COMB. OR CONCEALER, AT LEAST. I DON’T KNOW, DO SOMETHING. OR ELSE YOU’LL LOOK LIKE THIS AGAIN.”

And with that, the final vision evaporated into wisps of smoke, leaving a stench of sulfur and 13-year-old B.O.

Charlotte and Gabby stood in stunned silence, thinking on the ghostly warnings.

“Wow... I think we really learned a lesson this Christmas,” said Charlotte.

“Yeah,” said Gabby, “That sure put things into perspective.”

And with that, they settled back down to continue mocking their friends’ unflattering photos. Gabby ground her dolphin teeth, while Charlotte picked at a bit of dead skin on her lip. This was shaping up to be the best Christmas ever.

From left to right: Mrs. Cookie Barnesenoble (née Weatherman), with her elderly husband, eccentric millionaire John Barnesenoble. 

Mr. Barnesenoble enjoys his ten minutes of daily outdoor time, accompanied by his second-to-last wife and retired knee model, Cookie. The couple filed for divorce thirty minutes after this photo was taken.

Just kidding, these are two cheerless girls, getting pumped up for their first day of 12th grade.

From left to right: Charlotte Ahlin, wearing a bespoke dress, laboriously handcrafted from two of her dad’s old t-shirts, and Gabrielle Montoute, guarding her water bottle and wearing her signature headband and dad-style button-down.

You can’t tell from this photo, but Gabby and Charlotte are PSYCHED to FINALLY be sitting on the Senior Steps! (Note from the future: 12th grade wasn’t that great) The Senior Steps were the pinnacle of cool, where seniors would lounge with their $1 slices of pizza and $8 mocha venti frappes, lording over the rest of the courtyard. When we were in middle school, we couldn’t set foot on the Senior Steps without having seniors whip garbage and broken glass at us. And we would thank them for the honor.

Charlotte Ahlin (Atina) — Charlotte is delighted for her camp debut in The Little Mermaid!  She is so thankful that they added mermaid sister Atina so that she could have a part, and that they made the daring choice to include the mermaid sisters' song from the underrated classic, The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea.  She would like to thank all of her mermaid sisters, her parents, her cat Melchior (1996-2007), and her very best friend, Gabby!  "There are no small parts, only small actors."  No one has ever accused Charlotte of being small. Bunk 7 4eva!

For her Rumschpringe, young Temperance Umble journeyed from her hometown of Intercourse, PA to the Big Apple, where she attended a genuine New York City piano recital.  After the show, she was lucky enough to take a picture with living-statue-turned-pianist, Miss Giselle "Kitty" Orleans, despite Ms. Umble's fear that the camera would steal her soul.  Orleans was awarded Most Apathetic in the 8 to 13 age range.  Orleans is seen here on the left in her signature shapeless black dress, while Umble has stepped out in a racy sweater layered over her evening modesty bodice.

In honor of this year's award season, here's my own "red carpet" shot!  This is undoubtedly the best I ever looked between the years of 2007 and 2010.  I was 14. Only one year later, my doctor would make me get a CT scan because my stomach was so "unnaturally distended for a girl my age" that she suspected I had a tumor (I didn't have a tumor, I guess I was just the fattest teenager my doctor had ever encountered).  

My dad's cast was up for Best Revival of a Play, and so I got to go to the Tony Awards!  They won and, more importantly, my mom let me go to a hair stylist for the first (and to this date, only) time ever!  We sat in the very back row at Radio City, next to the giant camera crane.  It was magical.

Here, you can see me blinking back tears because my parents have just told me that I can't go with them to the after party in a bar with Hugh Dancy and Eddie Izzard.  But I did have to stand next to this pole and be photographed, before I put my hair back in a ponytail for the next two years.

First of all, we’d like to apologize for taking so long to update this blog.  Unfortunately, we live far away from each other during the school year so it’s hard to coordinate Skype dates.  Also, without the other one there how are we supposed to write one sentence and then have a conversation about people we went to high school with for two hours before singing the entirety of a musical?

So, to get to the point, the voting for the Shorty Awards is happening right now!  If you don’t know what those are, it’s an award show honoring the “best” in social media.  I say “best” because categories like Best Actress are under the same umbrella as Best Meme.  To make a long story longer, we’d like you to vote for us.  Quite honestly it feels gross to beg for votes, but wouldn’t it be cool to see our little blog about weird children get recognition amongst like, big, important blogs [important blogs not found]?  Please, please, please send your vote in HERE—it’s incredibly easy and it would mean a lot to us so get tapping (then I can stop saying things like “incredibly easy” and “get tapping”)! 

So we’re offering a little reward in the form of something we should have already given you: we’re actually going to post stuff (probably) starting tonight!  This video was taken on the day we decided to make this blog.  It doesn’t need much explanation except to say that Charlotte provided the photo and Gabby provided the laughter.

It's almost that time of the year again.  Pick out a tree!  Put up the lights! Send poorly-lit photos of your slouching daughter and her pet rats to every member of your extended family and all of your friends!

Yes, my parents sent out these photos in our Christmas card one year. They sent these photos to everyone we knew.

I thank them for this.  I now understand that they were surely trying to teach me humility.  After all, the true meaning of Christmas is not hiding your yellowed teeth with festive braces, or covering up your faux-velour sweatpants with a towel so the rats don't pee on them, or wearing a turtleneck over your cool new minimizer sports bra.  It's having parents so dedicated that they take three whole photos before deciding that one of them is probably passable enough for public viewing.  It's holding your beloved rats, Basil and Theodore Roosevelt, slightly away from your face because you never managed to teach them not to bite.  It's realizing that today, at age 20, you are wearing those same faux-velour sweatpants to hide your Thanksgiving gut because most of your other pants are at school right now.  On Thanksgiving when I was fourteen, my mom fed the rats leftover bourbon-sweet-potatoes and they got so drunk they couldn't walk straight.  And that is what the holidays are all about.

You must have so many questions about this photo.

How did you get a perfectly clear photo of two demonic night creatures emerging from the depths of their cave?  How did you know that a tastelessly-decorated birthday cake would be the perfect means of luring these ghouls out of their hiding place?  Does eating the cake make them too full to eat your essence?  How did you manage to escape their sweaty clutches?  Are there more of them?  What compelled one of them to wear a gigantic t-shirt that's almost the same color as her skin?  Is that an eyelash scarf on the floor or eyelash-scarf-slippers?  Is it true that the clamminess of their hands makes it easier for them to grab you?

Happy Halloween!

Being a kid is so fun… NOT.  As if!  I can’t wait to be a cool teen, like Britney Spears or Debbie Thornberry.  I’m going to wear flare-jeans and a different pair of jelly sandals every day. And maybe my mom will finally let me buy that Lizzie McGuire lipgloss.  We’ll have a Babysitter’s Club.  We’ll go to the mall every weekend and get hair wraps and new Baby-Gs.  We’ll date cute boys who look like Aaron Carter and Ash Ketchum and we’ll all hang at the skate park with water yo-yos.  After we’ve fed our Tamagotchis we’ll play snake on our new Nokia phones and then go to the high school dance in our denim dresses with our chokers and our slap bracelets.  We’ll hang out after school and smoke drugs instead of going home to play Skip-It on the stoop.  Furbies.  

For a period of time between 4th grade and 6th grade, Charlotte and Gabby’s relationship rested tenuously on a shared interest in horses.  Did you read Misty of Chincoteague?  Did you own the VHS tape of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron?  Amateur.  Go pet a police horse with the other posers.  

We. loved. horses.

You know that girl in your elementary school?  The one with the horse-themed charm bracelet?  The one who would neigh softly while running laps in gym class?  We were both that girl.  Seven-year-old Gabby once wrote a two-page “novel” about three young mustang foals who went on an adventure.  One of them tragically died, which was commemorated with a ballad, to be sung by one of the surviving colts.¹  Charlotte’s copycat “novel” included the twist of not revealing that the main characters were horses until the last line.  

Both of us dreamed of becoming professional equestrians.  We trained vigorously, signing up for the weekly horse elective at summer camp and taking hour-long pony-riding lessons in Cape Cod once every two years as pictured above.  Clearly one of us took it more seriously.²

As we grew older, however, adolescent apathy and fears of being kicked in the face took hold. Charlotte’s passions were abruptly dampened after being bitten by a horse at Colonial Williamsburg.  Gabby’s road to recovery was bumpier, but after being pulled aside by her 5th grade teacher and told that she was no longer allowed to exclusively read books with animal protagonists, she could never quite reignite the spark.

See below, Gabby and Charlotte after a riding lesson.  Gabby is overwhelmed by her emotions about horses.  Charlotte looks on in equine solidarity.

¹Gabby would like to note that she remembers all the lyrics to this ballad, but would not let Charlotte include them because addiction is an ongoing battle.

²Charlotte would like to note that she was never as obsessed with horses as Gabby was.³

Historians have long doubted that famed historical figures William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Rosa Parks (1913-2005) ever met in person, but recent photographic evidence has proven otherwise.  This photo, taken at Independence Hall during the signing of the Declaration of Independence, shows Shakespeare and Parks enjoying some complimentary snacks and posing for photographers.

The discovery of this photo, and their implied collaboration, answers pressing historical questions about the authorship of Shakespeare’s canon and might explain why Shakespeare set so many of his plays in Montgomery, Alabama.

Notable socialites Ms. Gabriela and Ms. Carlota arrive at the ÇampDrâmà show during 2007 Fall Fashion Week.

Ms. Carlota, heiress to the Elastic Waistband Denim fortune, checks her watch in blasé anticipation as she waits for the show to begin.  This is the first public appearance in stripes for Ms. Gabriela, widow of eccentric millionaire Mr. John Barnesennoble.  

The pair is seen here sporting their signature ponytails, a hairstyle they famously advocate on the grounds that “Other hairstyles make you look poor” (Elite Up-dos, 2003).

Gabby joined the local youth soccer league because she enjoyed healthy athletic competition.  Charlotte joined because Gabby joined, and because of the promise of orange slices and donut-holes during half-time.  Don’t be fooled by those trophies.  "The Turtles" went completely defeated that spring.  Have you ever seen a soccer coach hold back tears of frustration as he promises 10 pre-teen girls that “we’ll win at least one game”?  He lied.

"The Hippos", "The Shrimps" and "The Midnight" didn’t do much better in subsequent seasons, although "The Purple Floyd" managed to pull a few wins despite Charlotte’s listless defense strategy.

In the winter, Chelsea Piers would kindly rent out glass cages for off-season co-ed soccer, where "The Gryffindor" met with moderate success.  Surely this had nothing to do with the fact that Gabby and Charlotte were 1-3 years older, 1 foot taller, and 15 pounds heavier than every other child in the winter league.

Gabby would like to note that her perfectly round head looks like a bowling ball balanced atop a sandbag.

As you can tell from their panther-like physiques, Gabby and Charlotte were avid athletes.  They had such dedication to their craft that they took 5:30 am tennis lessons in exchange for McDonald’s breakfast and a nap.

Gabby continued doing soccer well into middle-school while Charlotte became an expert in the field of faking menstrual cramps to get out of gym.  

After flute-practice, Charlotte and Gabby liked to relax with a little unstructured city planning.  Here we see the groundwork for some kind of carnival, or maybe a post-industrial shantytown.  Whatever it is, it works well as one of those I-SPY books:

Can you spot...

...a Slimfast Can?

...four board games?

...Stitch from Lilo and Stitch?

...one of those balls from the Natural History Museum gift-shop that’s really small but then you pull at it and it becomes a weird spherical exoskeleton what the hell are they called?

...that Star Wars creature from the re-release?

...three Disney VHS tapes?

...the impetus for two well-adjusted young girls to create this manic nightmare-scape?

--BEGIN LOG--

Immediately post-kindergarten, Subject 2 (pictured here) begins showing signs of a denouement.  She has transitioned from Stage 2 "UC" or "Unbearable Cutness," to Stage 3 "OC" or "Occasional Cuteness." Subject 2 has been seen wearing navy blue corduroy pants and a black long-sleeve shirt, an outfit she has chosen without the help of her mother (also pictured here), who continues to be blamed for not informing Subject 2 that wearing black and navy blue together is a fashion faux pas.  We suspect Subject 2 has approximately six more months of OC before the penultimate stage, "HC" or "Happenstantial Cuteness," followed by the final stage, "SUU" or "Straight-Up Ugliness."