What Precedes Us

I attended a Mormon singles conference last weekend in Huntington Beach, California. One night, I was sitting in a hot tub with a bunch of people I didn't know. (Let me just take this opportunity to say that no matter how comfortable you are with your body, it is always awkward having "getting to know you" conversations with strangers in swimsuits. I don't really want to be acquainted with a man's chest before I know his name.)

Anyway, one guy was asking me questions about my life, and as he pieced together my biography, he said, "Wait a second. I think I've seen you before on youtube!" I silently panicked while trying to remember what he possibly could have seen. Suddenly, being half naked with this guy felt significantly less awkward than the conversation we were having.

It turns out that a few months ago, my parents had collaborated with some family friends to set me up with this guy's roommate. Like all good 21st-century stalkers, they had googled me and found this year-and-a-half-old footage of me and my brother Jeffrey lip-syncing. Although my new friend claimed that both he and his roommate thought that I was very "entertaining," his roommate never called me.

Exactly two days after that conversation in the hot tub, I received a voicemail from the film's intimidatingly cool co-star, Jeffrey. He has just moved to Washington, D.C. for a summer internship, and in his own words:

On the first day of my internship, when an old family friend, Rachel, was introducing me to people, this middle-aged man told me that he recognized me from somewhere. He started saying that he recognized me from TV or something, and I thought he was just trying to be funny. But he insisted, and finally claimed that he had remembered where he had seen me: on youtube. And then it clicked. He had seen the youtube video of us dancing to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." It turns out that Rachel had looked it up and shown it to everyone in the office, and it became a joke in the office even before I had gotten there.

After these back-to-back revelations, we took down a family holiday video we had made for our other brother, Ryan - ridiculous family behavior that should not be in the public domain. We also changed the name of the lip-syncing video from "Jen and Jeff Nuckols singing" to something a little more discreet. Little did we know that when we covered the TV with a green sheet and drew posters with Sharpies, we were preparing for one of the most important performances of our lives.