Well, I guess you are the friend John told me about when he told me the Gumby story. Anyway, the card was very interesting and in this group there is no need for a card to have a point.

Are there any other roommate stories?

I went to BYU; as you may have heard, it is a conservative school. When I was there in the late 70's female faculty and staff were not allowed to wear pants at all.

The letters to the editor in the school paper were often very interesting. One female student wrote in that she had gone to the testing center to take a test. She had on a pair of jeans and she was told she could not take the test because of her attire. She went into a bathroom, took off her jeans, buttoned her knee-length coat and went in and took the test essentially in her underwear. She reported this in the school paper.

Anyway, I digress. I had a roommate who had joined the Mormon church during one of her mother's "church hopping" trends. Because she was on the records of the church and very, very intelligent she received a large scholarship and that is how she decided to go to BYU.

She had wild black hair that was uncontrollable, thick glasses through which she would stare at you for an uncomfortably long time merely to see how you would react. She was very intelligent and enjoyed mind games which she played often on the unsuspecting, naive BYU students.

She and a girlfriend would go up to Salt Lake to a lesbian bar (they themselves were not) and dance. I personally have nothing against lesbians but you have to understand that merely admitting to going to a bar was enough to raise eyebrows.

She was a fairly dark personality. Many people tried to "help" her conform to the BYU student type because they truly believed they were helping her; they would take her to hairdressers and make sure she got to church, set her up on dates, a few of the guys believed they could save her.

She had a strange control over another roommate with whom she had roomed for several years. She owed the library a lot of money in fines and had many, many books that she had not returned. This other roommate took some overdue books back for her and the library clerk said, "You're Val Hudson, hey guys, THIS IS Val Hudson!"

Another roommate who was very, very Mormon (there were six of us in all) asked me, "How can we get Val to stop going to the bar?" I guess it was then that I realized you can only love people (excuse the sap) and you can't make them do anything. I guess this philosophy worked because it was reported that this group of roommates worked better with Val than other roommates in the past.

I kept in touch for a short time but I have lost contact. I don't know if she was really all that odd or if it was just that she was odd in the context we were in.