Friends and family told Jamie Mayes to forget about it. They told Jackie Yenowine that she couldn’t do it.

They did it anyway.

The Louisville freshmen, friends since the eighth grade, came to the Hill this fall as roommates.

Despite the nay-sayings of others they still decorate their room with colorful signs that say, ” Jackie and Jamie, Best Friends!” Each plans to return to the sixth floor of Minton Hall after Christmas break.

“We’re like twins with different parents,” Mayes said.

They like the same activities, watch the same movies and hang out with the same people. Each has taken a different path at Western, but as the semester draws to a close they realize that they did indeed make it … together.

Activities

Yenowine, a member of the Residence Hall Association, took a trip to Florida with other members of the association. Mayes also belongs to RHA. Together they are trying to start a Minton Hall volleyball team.

Each mapped out her academic career, but it didn’t take long for Mayes to realize that photojournalism wasn’t her thing. Yenowine came to the Hill as a broadcast major. Now she has her doubts.

“I realized how hard it would be to get in it (broadcasting), especially if you wanna be David Letterman,” she said.

The women have tackled more than schedule changes this semester.

Yenowine says she went to high school two days out of the week and still had a good grade point average. But she finds a western civilization class hard to stomach at 8 a.m.

“I go to that as much as I went to my high school classes,” she said.

Mayes has functioned as Yenowine’s alarm clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

On campus

When they aren’t in class, they’re calling up some of the handful of friends from high school who are in Bowling Green, too, and inviting them over. Yenowine and Mayes shared the same group of close friends in high school, but relationships have not been perfect — with two of them in particular.

“We aren’t friends anymore,” Yenowine said. “It’s a long story. When you get to college, you realize there are 17,000 other people you can be friends with.”

They’re still looking for new friends here on the Hill.

“We haven’t got a bond (with friends) yet, not like ‘Oh, let’s go out this weekend,'” Mayes said.

The two miss Louisville and spend most weekends at home. They say Bowling Green makes Louisville look like New York City, but they are never really bored here.

“We’ll have the funnest time just watching a movie,” Yenowine says, gesturing at a towering stack of videos that includes titles like “Shrek” and “Half-Baked.”

And when the star of “Half-Baked,” Jim Breuer, came to Western, the two charged full-steam ahead to Downing University Center Theatre, to find about two thousand other people there ahead of them.

“We were the last in the door. There were three after us,” Mayes said.

They say that seeing the comedian perform was the best experience of their college career, so far. Mayes proudly wears an autographed Jim Breuer T-shirt and a snapshot of Yenowine, and the funny man himself graces their dorm room wall.

Dorm life

The two were pleasantly surprised by the size of their dorm room but were tempted by the private baths and bunk beds of the directional halls next door.

“We put in for the directionals. They said, maybe in January,” Mayes said.

For now it seems that their “home away from home” next semester will be in Minton. And it hasn’t affected their optimism, or their decorating skills.

“All I wanted to do was move in and decorate,” Yenowine said.

The room is covered with Eminem posters and snapshots of the two and their families.

A snail named Pookie lives in a goldfish bowl, sitting in a place of honor between the two beds. Pookie replaced Snubbs and Oscar — goldfish who floated to the surface in their bowl, and were mourned right out the sixth floor window.

Dead goldfish, classes at 8 a.m., a psychology class that is especially tough — Yenowine and Mayes have found that no matter what they do or what they face, it’s always better to do it together.

Others have noticed the women have defied the skeptics when they made the decision to live together. They also realize that the two are a unit.

“It’s not, ‘Hey Jackie, and Jamie.’ It’s JackieJamie,” Mayes said. “It’s like one word.”