Once upon a time, I was a freshman in college. My roommates and I were crazy. One roommate in particular, Cow Woman, and I were constantly in cahoots about something or the other. One day she told me the story about her sister finding an envelope under the couch cushion with only the return address: Dragon Lady of Japan. Inside the envelope was a picture of a llama and a caption that said, "Llama spelled backwards is love." No one knew who it was from or what it was about. Then they all moved out. They never learned the story behind it. After Cow Woman told me the story, we hatched a brilliant scheme—we'd do the same thing to our roommates. We didn't know if it'd ever be discovered under the couch, however, so we decided to mail it to our apartment.
We copied the letter as best we could without having ever seen the original, and we stuck it in the mail. One roommate opened it, she thought it was junk mail and threw it away. We never would have known of its arrival had one of us not seen it in the garbage can. So as tactfully as we could, we pulled it out and asked, "What in the world is this?" To which the roommate replied, "Oh, it came in the mail today. It's probably some stupid chain letter." And that was the end of it in her mind. Not exactly the reaction we wanted.
The inspiration kind of died until the next semester when that roommate had moved out and new roommates moved in. The spark was rekindled and several other letters were sent. These roommates loved them. Every letter got hung on the fridge. Too much time was spent trying to figure out who Dragon Lady was. It got blamed on our FHE brother, who, admittedly, fit the bill. He loved taking credit for it. In fact, he made an AIM screen name: dragonladyofjapan and started talking to one of my roommates with it. I can still remember the shrill scream followed by: "Guys! Guys! You have to come here! You will never believe who is IM-ing me! DRAGON LADY OF JAPAN!!!" Cow Woman and I could not believe our ears. We certainly weren't doing it—who else could it be? When we found out that it was FHE Brother, we about died laughing. In fact, one of our roommates, Cali Girl, was convinced it was him. She was dead set on it. At the end of the semester we let FHE Brother in on the joke simply so that we could get him to send her a Dragon Lady letter to her house, postmarked from the state FHE Brother was from—just to perpetuate her belief that it was him.
Ahhh... good memories. Dragon Lady basically died after that. We all moved away; slowly roommates figured out it was us. Many of us lost touch with each other. It was just a good memory.
You think I'm done, don't you? Oh no... not even close. That was just the introduction. Now let's get on to the meat of the story.
Fast forward to my Senior year of college. I had been living with "old and mature" girls for the past several semesters and had forgotten what it was like to be silly and spontaneous. Suddenly, Desdemona (one of the "old and mature" roommates) and I got 4 new roommates—all 19-years old. Now, if you could epitomize the stereotype of 19-year old girls and multiply that by four, you'd have my new roommates. Desdemona nicknamed them "The Crazies". (Disclaimer: I am not saying this to be mean. I love those four girls dearly. They are some of my favorite roommates. But, they scared me to death when they first moved in; I wasn't sure how to handle them. All this knowledge is vital to understanding why I did what I did next.) For the first month, Desdemona and I struggled to really connect with these girls. One day, I was really frustrated with not being close to them, and, realizing that I was going to have to bring out my crazy side again, I starting thinking back. What was something I did my freshman year that I would be willing to do again? It hit me—Dragon Lady. Now, I recognize the inherent flaw in my logic at this point. The whole point of Dragon Lady was to keep anonimity. So, by definition, it wouldn't bring us closer together. However, even after I recognized that flaw, I realized how perfect this set of roommates was for Dragon Lady, and there was no turning back.
I put together the first letter, the classic llama (to make it better, I found a picture of two llamas kissing), and stuck it in the mail, then waited anxiously for the letter to come. May I just say here that waiting for the mail on a day that you know a Dragon Lady letter is coming, without going and getting the mail yourself, or without saying or doing anything that would indicate you knew it was coming, is really hard! The letter came. One of the crazies brought it in the apartment. I pretended I wasn't paying attention. She opened the letter and was like, "What?!" It was beautiful confusion. No one claimed to know anything about it, so they hung it on the fridge because it was funny, but didn't really think twice about it. I had expected as much, though—I still remembered the reaction it had received the last time I had tried it. At least this one made the fridge instead of the trash can.
I went to work and told my co-workers about it. They loved the idea, but one coworker in particular, Humble Master, informed me that it wasn't good enough. What?! How in the world was the classic llama not good enough?! He had an easy answer: it made too much sense—both the picture and the caption had to do with llamas. It needed to be more random. Hence Humble Master became my Dragon Lady cohort. About a month later, we decided it was time for another letter. With the help of our other co-workers, we came up with the next caption based off an old TV show, "That's the way the pork" with an old-fashioned picture of a guy in a swimming suit, complete with flesh colored long sleeves and leggings underneath. Funny story about that one—I printed it off, then printed off a paper. I was late for class, so I just grabbed the stack and stapled it together. Luckily, just before I handed in my paper, I thought to myself, "Now what did I do with the Dragon Lady letter?" At which point I realized it was stapled to the back of my paper. Humorous as that may have been to see my teacher's reaction to that, I decided to pull it off and mail it.Again, I waited anxiously for them to get the mail. Crazy I came in after getting the mail. She was frantic. It was all I could do to keep from laughing. "Guys! We've got another letter from Dragon Lady of Japan!!! Look at it! Does it mean anything to anyone?!" She then proceeded to go all CSI on me. She googled "Dragon Lady of Japan" to no avail. (If you google it now, you'll find answers from the 100 Hour Board.) She googled "That's the way the pork" to no avail. She compared the zip codes from the postmarks and determined where they must be sent from. (She was wrong, sadly.) While searching the second one for clues, she exclaimed, "This one has [dramatic pause] a staple hole!" Ahhh... I'm so glad my silly mistake could provide such confusion. :) Then finally, she looked at the dates on the postmarks and with wide eyes announced that they were sent exactly one month apart. I had no idea I had done that. "Great," I thought, "Now I have to send them on the 15th every month."
The desired reaction was achieved, and we had two Dragon Lady letters hanging on our fridge.
The next few weeks were dedicated to finding out who this Dragon Lady of Japan was. They went through all of their friends, eliminating those that would never have done it, keeping track of those that could have. They never suspected Desdemona or I or even our friends. Obviously, we would never do something crazy like this. We were too mature for that. hehehe
We started a list at work of random phrases that we could use for future captions. We started a folder on my computer of random pictures we found. In light of the Christmas season, a brilliant idea struck—The Twelve Days of Dragon Lady Christmas. For twelve days we sent letters—each one subtly incorporating the number of that day—each one postmarked from a different state. It was pure genius. The first few letters we were able to send from different states due to having friends and family across the country willing to print a letter we emailed and sacrifice a stamp to send it. Then, the geographic diversity of my workplace became incredibly helpful. We printed out the remainder of the letters, put them in stamped envelopes, then as coworkers went home for the holidays, we gave them a letter, asking them to postmark it on a certain day. The craziness of the postal service during the holiday rush proved entertaining as some days no letters came, other days we got 3. It took several letters and a giant hint that one of my friends wrote on the back of an envelope: "On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me..." for my roommates to figure out that it was the twelve days of Christmas. To help the confusion, they started numbering the letters and the envelopes they came inside in the order that they were received, whether or not that was in numerical order or not. Letters received on the same day got a letter after the number. My only regret from this portion was that one letter got sent from the Capitol building in Washington DC, but the postmark had no date, no city, nothing. Only the squiggly lines that covered the stamp. And I couldn't say anything!!!
Christmas came and went. Crazy II left the country for a study abroad and Crazy V moved in to take her place. We continued on in January and February. We finally had to move the letters off of the fridge because they had taken over the entire thing. We left the latest one on and moved the rest to an envelope on top of the fridge. Every letter and envelope was numbered in the order received so that, in case of needing to decode some secret message later, we would know which came from where.Finally, in February, I asked them if they had figured out who had been sending the letters. Their response?
"Nah. We've decided it's some random person sending them to a random apartment. We don't think they actually know us." Ahhh!!! Not the response I had been wanting to get! This had to change. So, for March's letter, I pulled all the ward directory photos of all the girls that had lived in my apartment during the Dragon Lady saga and Photoshopped them into a Brady Bunch grid. With two spaces left over, I put a question mark in the center and the dragon from Shrek in the last one.* Then I waited. Again. This wait was the worst.The letter was opened. There were screams all around. The secret was out—Dragon Lady was someone they knew. Even better, it had to be someone in the ward—with access to the ward directory. Now, the simple fact that the ward directory was created on my computer escaped them. Instead of suspecting me, they asked me who had access to my computer and the ward directory. Honestly, every clue pointed straight to me, but they were completely blinded against any such hint. But the challenge was on—they were determined to figure out who it was.
After much debate and consideration, they figured out Dragon Lady's identity. Or so they thought. The credit was given to two former FHE brothers: Jack and JB. Honestly, I could not have framed them better had I tried. Jack had helped with the ward directory cover. Both had the persona of pranksters. Crazy V doubted that they could pull off anything this elaborate, however. The very afternoon that she had expressed her doubts, the boys came over and told the girls that they wanted to make a scavenger hunt during finals week, renting out advertising space in the Daily Universe to put the clues in. After hashing out the details of their plan and after they left, Crazy V changed her opinion—they were capable of elaborate schemes. It was set—Jack and JB were the prime suspects.
Revenge began in The Crazies' passive aggressive way. The two boys' names were hyphenated and subscribed to two different mailing lists. As soon as I heard that, I started to get nervous. I was responsible, but these boys were receiving the revenge. Now that's all fine and good, but what happens when they find out it's me!? So I started standing up for the boys. "What if it's not them and you're doing all this to them? You're going to feel awful." Then came the clincher—after watching an episode of The Office with Jack where all of Dwight's stuff is stolen then returned in Jello, an idea was born. Within a week, Jack's cell phone was stolen, shrink-wrapped thrice, then set in Jello. An episode of doorbell ditching later, the cell phone was returned. You know, kudos to Jack for his good-natured humor. I seriously feared for my life when they started carrying out this particular scheme. I just knew Jack was going to kill me once he found out who the real Dragon Lady was. Instead, he just played into it. He would come over and compliment the font chosen for the letter. He would ask if we had any more letters. It drove the girls bonkers. I loved it.
However, the fear for the revenge the girls would output upon me after, I hatched a scheme myself. I brought my fear back to Humble Master and asked him to write up a contract for them to sign, promising to cause me no harm, if I ever did decide to reveal myself. He wrote it in typical Dragon Lady fashion—random and humorous.
... to be continued
* For privacy purposes, the pictures have been changed to chrome.
