Andrea's World Tour '98
"If it happened in 1998 how come her age ranges by about five years in these pictures?""Sh! Have a cookie!"
It was the summer after my freshman year; I remember it well.
I decided not to stay home for just another dull summer on the farm.
"Hmmm," I thought. "What shall I do?"
A cure for cancer? World peace?
No, I only had three months before I had to return to school.
Then it hit me: tour the world.
I played the title role for the sold-out London opening of
the rock-opera "Berendekis." It's only coincidental that
the microphone resembles an ice cream cone.
After the last scene, in which Berendekis is transformed
into a ladybug, the crowd was so impassioned that they
stormed the stage when I tried to leave.
(They love me, they really love me.)
After barely escaping the opera house, I boarded the first
plane I could, which happened to be headed for Albania.
By the time I'd been there for two days, peace talks were going well.
(The picture above is of me with the delegation of ethnic Albanians.)
When things appeared to be under control, I left matters in
the hands of my associates. This proved to be my only error
of judgment, as the treaty's signing fell through in the end.
I'm sure it would have gone well had I stayed.
But I didn't know that at the time. I had already left to
work with a non-profit organization to deliver aid to needy
ethnic Albanians. (I'm pictured above with a young peasant
girl named Aschenbrudel.) Some of the things I saw and
experienced were truly shocking. She was unaffected; she'd
been seeing that sort of thing all her life.
Since I was a little rusty in the native language and customs,
I brought along my trusty guide and bodyguard, Heimlich.
We set up in a camper at the edge of a village.
The local children were quite curious about us, me in
particular, and I often had to hide if I was to get any of
my work done.
Unfortunately, things quickly got tense.
After a rainstorm and the sabotage of a dam, rivers overran
their banks and we tried desperately to rescue the natives.
Flood waters rose more quickly than any of us, except maybe
me, could have imagined. Here I am with another rescuer on
the roof of a "K-Avekjadva," their equivalent of a K-Mart.
When the water level finally started to go down, we found ourselves
in the middle of nowhere, although it was a beautiful nowhere.
None of us knew how to get back to anywhere.
Naturally, I was the one chosen to lead all 250 of us to safety.
Unfortunately, we encountered "Black Max," the evil mountain
man who insisted that we go a different, longer, way.
Some, who had just found hope that we might make it back
to safety after all, were disheartened, but I maintained
a positive outlook.
In the end we were saved when a peasant girl's trained tiger
cub jumped out of her grasp and clawed at Black Max.
Two days later we reached a hotel with room service.
And then on the second day of my world tour...