Sleepover at the Dojo/That Time I Learned Karate

I joined the Shotokan karate club in the spring of my freshman year. It’s probably the most athletic thing I’ve ever done. My boyfriend at the time was trying to help the karate club grow and recruited me along with several of our friends.

The Sensei was a woman in the community with a black belt and a desire to teach. She was so nice, but she ran a tough class. It was a Tuesday/Thursday evening/Saturday morning situation. Though I usually didn’t make it out of bed early enough on Saturdays.

The following fall we were ready to test for our yellow belts. The testing was all the way up in Bemidji (Minnesota) about 4 1/2 hours away. After scraping together our testing and membership money we didn’t have anything left for lodging. But apparently it was common practice to hand over the keys and let students sleep in the dojo if they have nowhere else to go. So that’s what we did.

There were five of us all together in our carpool; my then-boyfriend, Steph, her then-boyfriend, Ann, and me.

I don’t remember the specifics of the stay but we were bored at one point and decided to go down to the Pamida or K-mart or whatever. One thing led to another and we wound up purchasing a box of hair dye for Steph.

The dojo had a tiny little bathroom/storage closet down in the basement. We dyed her hair in the little pedestal sink, being very careful to leave no trace. She had straight medium brown hair and it was pretty easy to dye. This time I think we did red, but another time we did purple, the kind you can buy in the regular hair dye boxes.

Steph’s hair turned out great. We didn’t make a mess. We didn’t ruin anything in the dojo overnight and then the next day all of our tests were successful. It was an awesome adventure.