Saturday Night Live in Hillsdale

There's Barbara, and Meryl right behind her, shortly before Meryl, Mark and I decided to call it a night. Saturday we spent many hours at the festival and we were not only tired but wanting to get back to the dogs. So the three of us headed home around midnight, on the long dark winding unpaved country roads. Lots of deer, lots of nervous driving. We arrived at the Solovay driveway, and right on our tail were a couple of impressive emergency vehicles, including a real fire truck. We got of the car, assuming we'd watch them drive on by, when to our surprise they pulled right in behind us. The rather large Captain approached in a hurry, "the smoke alarm is going off", and Mark and I threw open the front door and ran for the stairs, each grabbing a poodle and heading back out. Three guys ran through the house, while the three of us, two holding poodles, watched, stunned. The big guy came barreling down the stairs calling out to us, "the house has been ransacked, the closets have been emptied!" "Let me go look" was my response and I ran upstairs, into each bedroom, noticing that Leandra's room appeared to have every possible article of clothing in a pile on the floor. I took a quick look at the other rooms which looked pretty normal to me, ran back downstairs, and said to the Captain, "a teenage girl came home from camp today, I think that's what her room is supposed to look like." Meryl asked, "is this a Saturday Night Live sketch, and is that John Candy?" Meanwhile Mark was running around with two phones, the house phone with the alarm company, which only worked inside the house, and his cell phone with Paul on it, which only worked outside the house.

It took quite a while but the nice and concerned volunteer fire guys all left with their serious trucks, the three of us still standing around, half in shock, half hysterical, until Susan and Paul showed up and we got to tell the whole hilarious ridiculous story, and then again when Barbara, Steve & Alec arrived.

A wild ending to a great, long day. Oh, and I guess the conclusion was that the heat lightening in the air was what set off the fire alarm. Which, by the way, mostly rang in the fire station, or wherever, and not in the house. And the lightening preceeded a major storm that started moments after Paul left to go back to the festival to pick up Leandra and her friend. But that's another story.