This is the first writing I've done in my Graduate career. I am in Los Angeles for my 10 day residency at Antioch University where I am getting my MFA. Today was our first day of work/class. My Writing for Young People workshop advisor gave us a writing prompt for us to write about our neighborhood in a 7 minute free-write this afternoon. This is what I wrote, no edits:
   
      Sunset Avenue, named for being on the west side of Norfolk, Nebraska. Someone told us your porn star name is your middle name plus the street you grew up on. Darby Sunset. That's me. First house on the corner. You know, my garage is where that stop sign everyone blows through on eighteenth street is? The stop sign everyone hates, but we think is essential so we can get out of our garage, but really; that's probably stupid because no one actually stops at it, even though we live next to an elementary school.
     Five houses down is Carrie's house, she'd be Lynn Sunset in porn, right next to Bob and Boob's house. Bob and Boob? Oh, they're ok. Barb (now Boob) used to live with Mark, but they got divorced and she got braces and new boobs and Bob.
     Nineteen houses down is where Mandy lives. On the cul-de-sac. She'd be Jo Sunset.
     Behind our houses, on the south side of Sunset Avenue, is The Field. In The Field we play baseball and tackle football with the boys. No boys live on Sunset Avenue. In The Field most of our games end in fights.
     Behind The Field is The Meadows, the old folks home where we girls pretend we have some old relative so we can get free soft serve ice cream. Carrie did have Mary Mills, a great-great aunt's sister's niece's cousin of some sort, but Mary died and we kept going for ice cream.
     The Meadows where the the sprinklers come on at 10:11 on summer night, something we learned when I was finally allowed to stay out past when the streetlights came on. The streetlights on Sunset Avenue, which is across the street from Westside Elementary School, where the three of us girls are best friends one day, fighting the next, but always, always in detention, every day in sixth grade writing the school creed over and over:
               "I will act in such a way that I will be proud of myself and others will be proud of me. I came to school to learn and I WILL learn. I will have a good day."
Eventually the three Sunset girls will get their own paragraph since the school creed evidently doesn't sink in.  That will come from Lynn and Darby Sunset skipping down the halls of Westside singing "Pretty Fly for a White Guy."