Amy Lupini: The Two-Year Crush
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
For about two solid years, I had an ongoing crush on Amy Lupini. Of all of the crushes I had had up to that point, Amy was the one that lasted the longest, and one of the many I never landed. Even still, I completely cherish the friendship that I had with her during my fifth and sixth grade years (in which she is seen in the class photo at right). There is no way that I could possibly have felt rejected, considering I never had the guts to tell her how I felt or put forth a request that she ‘go with’ me. So I stood by and idly watched as she went with Jason Painter in the fifth grade and my best friend Eric Welch in the sixth. Sigh. The love lessons we learned in grade school… Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you who may have been concerned – and I know there are many of you – that I was not going to reach an acceptable quota (whatever that may be) of ‘reunions’ with old friends whom I hadn’t seen in five or more years, you obviously had forgotten that this was the 20th anniversary of my graduation from Beavercreek High School. So on Saturday, July 17, 2010 – less than a week after returning from Florida – I headed out for my third high school class reunion being held at the Holiday Inn in Beavercreek. 
There were two specific girls who I knew during my Junior year at Beavercreek High School. Both attractive, both blond, both with good senses of humor. I had no idea at the time that they even knew one another. Angie Crowder was in my American History class with Mr. Holliday and Jennifer Grimes was in my Math class with Mrs. Boff. As you might suspect, I liked to tease girls back in high school. Actually I did that well before high school…and well after. But nevertheless, I liked to tease them. Angie, I quickly found, was one girl who liked to tease back. 
When I first moved from Fairbrook to Ankeney in the Fall of 1984, our former arch rivals from Valley Elementary were converging into the same junior high. Therefore I had a whole new set of faces and potential friends and enemies. The smart kids now had more competition, the pretty girls now had more competition, and the popular kids now had more competition if they were going to be running as class officers. My friend