Olga and I met on her first night working at Seville Quarter, here in Pensacola.  I’d only started there a few weeks earlier, and one of the bartenders knew I spoke a fair amount of [rusty] Russian – so, with that in mind, when he introduced us and informed me that Olga is originally from Ukraine (though she’s lived in St. Louis since she was 13), I immediately struck up conversation with her.  In Russian.  Which turned out to be a huge tactical error on my part because, when her eyes got wide with excitement and she started replying to me… in Russian… quickly… and I realized I couldn’t keep up, I had to switch to English (did I mention my Russian’s rusty?).  Our friendship has pretty much remained in English ever since, except when one or both of us happens to be drunk, at which point we switch in and out of Russian, and any other language(s) in which either of us suddenly and drunkenly feels ourselves magically fluent. 

We soon realized our common ground as out-of-towners – and out-of-workers – struggling to adjust to life in Pensacola, and that we’d both happen to be attending the 2006 MATSG-21 Marine Corps Birthday Ball with our respective dates several weeks later.  With The Perfect Dresses in mind, we set out on the first of many shopping trips together, and have shopped, dined, drunk, laughed, cried and “womited” together times too numerous to count over the last three-and-a-half years.  We laughed as we danced beside (and, more often than not, collided into) each other in Rosie O’Grady’s Piano Bar while working at Seville Quarter (“the lawn sprinkler” was a particularly dangerous dance for us when performed together) and are, when paired together, quite possibly the blondest entity you’ll ever meet.  Most notably, she’s “Cupid”: the one who introduced Jason and I at Hobby Lobby in June 2006 (and who conveniently forgot to clear out her guest bedroom for me, knowing I could just as easily stay in Jason’s guest bedroom.  “Coincidence” my butt. I still say she planted those fleas at the house in Mobile).  :-P 

She is the only reason I kept my sanity in the early months – the hardest months – of living in a new town, and is the whole reason Jason and I ever met in the first place.  I’m honored to have our “Cupid” standing beside me as I marry “that hot guy from Hobby Lobby.”