Behind the Scenes: 15 Super Weird Things About Us You Probably Don’t Know

July 7, 2020

Behold! A behind-the-scenes post in which we share some really REALLY silly things about ourselves!

1. Oscar Wilde totally approves of our tattoos, which are both inspired by his fairy tales. Sara has a nightingale on her wrist, and Brittany has a rose on her leg. When we went to Dublin, we paid homage to Wilde’s statue by presenting him with the components of “The Nightingale and the Rose,” with much brandishing of limbs!

[Wilde Approved.]

2. Early in our friendship, we went to see Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. We were both so obsessed that we mutually agreed we had to go back the next night to see it again. We think this may have been the moment we realized we were going to be friends forever.

[Baby Sara and Brittany at the theatre, about to be overwhelmed with the awesome that is Arcadia!]

3. Brittany hates celery so much that when Sara cooks with it, she comes wailing into the kitchen crying “nooooooo celeryyyyy!” from actual rooms away. Sara absolutely loathes bananas.

4. One time “Total Eclipse of the Heart” came on the sound system in a thrift store. We RAN from opposite sides of the shop, met in the middle, GASPED with joy when we found each other, and sang our hearts out while the surrounding thrifters looked on with confusion.

5. We once lived together in an apartment with a loft in Columbus, Ohio – Sara lived downstairs, Brittany lived upstairs (and frequently acted out dramatic scenes on her little balcony loft.) At one point, four cats and one enormous Akita lived there too!

[Right after we moved in, with Sara’s cats Ro and Keats!
Sara’s mom dubbed this picture “2×2”]

6. When we moved into the loft, we rented a U-HAUL to go get some furniture we found on Craigslist. We got the smallest van they had… but they were all out of those when we got there and Sara had to drive THE BIGGEST U-HAUL OF THEM ALL. She cried. Brittany laughed wildly. 

[Brittany does feel terrible about this in retrospect!]

7. We have a time-honored tradition of taking pictures exactly like this at every amusement park we go to. Look at Brittany’s eyes!

[Everytime.]

8. We have an undying obsession with this YouTube video. If one of us is grouchy or stressed, there is a HIGH likelihood that the other one will start blasting this song until we both start cackling. This has been our psych-up song for more conference presentations and lectures than we can count. So if you ever wonder what we’re doing right before we get on stage or on camera, now you know!

[“And I try… OH MY GOD do I try…”]

9. On Facebook, to express our agreement, we will send each other the cat emoji. It’s kinda like “🐈 [this sounds good to me]” “🐈 [yes, I concur]” The cat is a very important member of the Carterhaugh team. Even in serious conversations about schedules or finances, the 🐈 is how we indicate a yes!

10. We both cried when we saw this in person at the Tate. And we stayed in this room (full of Pre-Raphaelite paintings!) until we got kicked out of the museum at closing time.

[Actual tears.]

11. We once came up with a very excellent concept for a BBC America TV show. We still can’t believe it didn’t get picked up.

[It had such a brilliant premise?]

12. We’ve seen Florence & the Machine together a ridiculous number of times in concert, in a ridiculous number of states. We have taken buses, cars, trains, and planes to see her, and we have absolutely no chill about it. #noregret

13. We love New York City with all of our hearts. It is a source of constant inspiration for us, and we go every chance we get! Seriously, want to go right now? We are there. Well, or would be, if it weren’t for Covid-19. BUT SOON.

14. Sara once bought Brittany these socks for Christmas. They remain one of the best presents she has ever received.

[BREAD.]

15. Our first ever collaboration was a poem about the Snow Queen, and we wrote it by trading a three-ring notebook back and forth while sweltering next to a pool in a Virginia high summer. It was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and we decided we needed to write poetry together more often. This led to doing other projects together… which led to Carterhaugh!

LOL! We had a great time putting this list together, so we hope you enjoyed our utter weirdness :P. Now it’s your turn though – share a weird fact about yourself in the comments (they are indeed working again!)

Comments

  1. Donna Kennefy

    I can’t resist buying every fairytale, folklore & myth book I see at estate & yard sales & used book sales, even if I can’t read them all. I have everything from “Dab Meet Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos” (I ordered that one) to a set of 20 big picture books of fairytales published in the 1960s by McCall Books.

  2. Lara Campbell

    I guess my weirdest trait is I have developed in last 4 years a severe phobia of driving on the highway. I have panic attacks when on the highway so it has become dangerous for me to even attempt it. I still go places, I just set the “avoid highways” tab on google maps directions and take the “back roads”. It takes a bit longer to get to my destination, but I have discovered some really cool places and beautiful routes along the way. It can be be debilitating and embarrassing at times though. Hopefully, one day I’ll get over it..

  3. Kimberly

    I absolutely adore this friendship ♥️ I’d love to have one like this. Maybe one day lol I’m not sure what the weirdest thing is about me

  4. Linda M Willson

    I was interviewing people to be volunteers at Safe Place and Rape Crisis Center many years ago. Twice a year we trained volunteers and always found so many great, caring women to participate. One year a very handsome young male attorney came to be
    interviewed; I was secretly thrilled. After he left (he became a fantastic volunteer), I thought I’d give the staff a good laugh. I messed up my hair, smeared my lipstick, unbuttoned the top buttons of my blouse and ran out of my office yelling, “What a guy!” Three nuns in black habits stood there, their eyes wide and their mouths hanging
    open with shock. They were not amused. For once, I was speechless.

    1. That is an AMAZING story!!! This isn’t quite as epic, but here’s the closest thing I’ve got: my husband and I are both a little camera-shy, so we decided to do an engagement photo session with our photographer a few months before we got married to get to know him and get used to being photographed in a less high-stress environment. We went to this gorgeous conservatory garden, and our photographer was amazing, but he kept telling us to kiss. And what he couldn’t see was that there were THREE NUNS standing right behind him, STARING AT US. And so we’d, like, do a peck on the lips, and he’d yell “guys, what was that, just GO FOR IT, ARE YOU IN LOVE OR NOT?” and we just wanted to shriek “BUT THE NUNS ARE WATCHING.”

  5. Claire Thomas

    This list is fantastic! I, too, love the He Man “What’s Going On” video tremendously, and have even tried to get it played at weddings in the past! (unsuccessfully) I also LOVE “Total Eclipse of the Heart” – so much so that my friend and I came up with a very strange interpretive dance when we listened to it in college… definitely not weird at all….

    Additional strange things about me: I like to plan trips abroad for my dad, my husband and I (it all started with a trip to Scotland in high school). However, my trips are known to be intense and jam-packed – my dad calls it The Amazing Race – and something bizarre inevitably happens. There was the time our rental Mercedes SUV (not my idea, it was literally the only car left!) got a flat tire on a bank holiday in Iceland and we had to change it ourselves in a gas station parking lot, or the time we stayed overnight in a converted chicken coop due to a mix up with our hotel reservation, or the time we went dolphin watching on a tiny boat in “moderate to heavy seas” (i.e. 15 foot swells), or the time my husband and I rented a demon car for our honeymoon, which honked whenever we started or stopped the engine for NO REASON. But there have been some great times and great stories along the way!

    Incidentally, my husband and I have a tradition of visiting NYC every year for Christmas shopping – it’s always a special day, and I look forward to it all year!

    1. Everything about this is amazing, and I will join you in your campaign to get the He-Man song played at weddings. (Brittany and I also have very elaborate interpretive dance routines, which I choose to blame on Kate Bush.)

      “the time we stayed overnight in a converted chicken coop due to a mix up with our hotel reservation”…I must know more.

      1. Claire Thomas

        Haha! 🙂 The chicken coop story is a long one, but the brief summary is that I was teaching myself Icelandic through this online web class, and there was a whole segment on this historic town in the middle of nowhere in the northwest of Iceland where there was a fishery in the early 1900s. Now it is largely abandoned except for an old hotel. I don’t know why, but I was fascinated by the idea of visiting it, so when I planned a trip to Iceland, it was on my list of places to see. To make a reservation at the hotel, I had to phone Iceland from North Carolina and speak to the owner, a very kindly older woman.

        On the day of our reservation, we (my dad, my husband, and I) stopped for dinner in the closest town and then drove two hours along the coast on the windiest, tiniest dirt road you can imagine. When we arrived at the hotel, it was about 8 pm (but still light out, because it was Iceland) and we discovered there had been a mix-up with our reservation. The old woman had forgotten that we had booked in, and the hotel was already full of hikers! It was late and there was nowhere else to stay unless we drove all the way back to the town where we’d eaten. Eventually they offered us one of the “outbuildings” for the night. Long story short, it turned out to be a chicken coop made of plywood that had been cleaned and converted into hostel-style accommodations. It was also literally suspended over a stream rushing down from the nearby cliffs, so there was nothing but air and water beneath the floorboards. It was definitely not a restful night, but one of the most memorable I’ve ever had while traveling!

  6. Michelle Anderson

    Love that! Especially the He Man Clíp hahahaha. That was class.
    My weird fact is I try and stop at every brown tourist sign I see on the roads. In the UK these are signs for castles , zoos, candle making factories etc. I just love visiting new places that aren’t always on a map

  7. Deborah Sage

    I have a weird story about my best friend and my recently passed birthday. I had sent Leslee a lovely, rather extravagant tea assortment for her birthday this year. She loved it. On my birthday she sent me a beautiful message. A few days letter she sent this one, “So, I decided to send you some cookies from the Midway Bakery for your birthday — I have the tea, you have the biscuits… It would have helped if I had given them your address rather than mine. By the way, I sampled the corn cookies and the sorghum cookies, and you loved them both.” My best friend sent my birthday gift to herself and then ate the cookies. I love her so much!

  8. Kim (aka. Gypsy)

    In a way, it’s kind of harder to think of something about me that is normal…all things are stories. My boyfriend and I love to travel and, on long trips, we listen to audio books. Odd things happen to us while we are listening to books by Neil Gaiman. The first, while we were listening to “Black Dog” in the book ‘Trigger Warning’, was that a house cat came out of the tall grass next to the highway, sat near the side of the road, locked eyes on us in our car and watched us as we drove past. Afterward, it nonchalantly disappeared back into the grass. It was as if Bast wanted us to know she was there and had her eyes on us. The second instance is a little long, but it involved ‘American Gods’, a small town and a gas station at sundown.

  9. Jenny

    I too cried in the Tate. I was in London for a semester, and had class at the Tate weekly. It was heaven.

    Fun fact about me – I was on HGTV’s “That’s Clever”. I was filmed in my basement studio creating a mermaid shrine. It was a blast. After I submitted my proposal, I had to agree to modify the original and cover the mermaid’s prominent nipples!

  10. Michelle Pittenger

    I have sung the soundtrack to Cabaret in full costume on a golf course.

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