My Brother Rick loves my girlfriends! He's actually my eldest brother and you may have seen his picture in the slang dictionary right next to the entry for 'People Person'. He loves meeting new friends and seems to have no particular comfort zone.... his entire 'zone' is his comfort zone. Stick him in a roomful of strangers and he'll leave the room a bit later with a bunch of new buds. It's amazing actually. I also consider myself a people person although I definitely have 'zones' in which I am more comfortable. Stick me in a room filled with strangers and I'll leave a bit later with some 'potentials'... and my face and neck will be blotchy, which is what happens to me when I am pushed out of my comfort zone.... but more on that later.
I've never had trouble making friends but can honestly say that I have found friendship nirvana with the group of friends that I have been close to for the last ten years or so. We've laughed, cried, and generally been there for each other in ways that are way beyond my expectations. I know that it all sounds quite cliché' but we are like family except that miraculously, we actually CHOSE each other.
We are a pretty wild bunch.... we love to get together for happy hours, we love to talk and laugh, we LOVE to dance and be silly (some of us more than others), we even love to go to Applebee’s on Karaoke night and torture fellow patrons with our special renditions of tunes like 'Love Shack' and 'Goodbye Earl'. We look out for each other’s kids and deliver dinners when someone has a crisis. We look out for each other.
Case in point: One night shortly after one of the girls went through a divorce, a group of us went out for a girls gone “sort-of-wild” night… Don’t confuse us with the regular ‘wild’ girls you may have seen on TV commercials (and had to hide your kids eyes from) Not one of us lifted our tops to reveal that underneath we were wearing a thick strip of black duct tape over our boobs!
Here’s the deal - One of our men drops us off, and later, one of them picks us up…. We are responsible girls gone sort-of-wild! One of our favorite spots is a restaurant/club called Stumps Supper Club, which is exactly what it sounds like…. They serve down home food and delicious drinks that are served in plastic buckets with 20 or so really long straws, which have actually, I’m certain, poked someone’s eye out. By the 2nd shared bucket, we are no longer trying to keep track of whose straw is which, nor are we reminding each other not to backwash. By the second bucket, we are simply primed sufficiently to dance like nobody’s looking. Even though they probably are… as well as chuckling…. And pointing too…. But we don’t care. We’re just the wild bunch, out there having the time of our lives!
We have all done this together enough times that we know which songs, that when the band starts playing them, it is mandatory to dance…. together… ALL together. We each have one or two favorites, and it’s a given, that when someone else’s favorite starts, we HAVE to dance to it …. Even if we aren’t crazy about it. Okay, so I’ve never even told her this before, but I really don’t like my friend Karen’s pick, ‘I Melt with You”…. But when I hear that intro…. I’m out there dancing my little heart out and loving that my friend is loving grooving out with all “her girls” to her special song. One of my favorite parts of the evening is when the band takes a break and they play a 15 or 20 minute long club mix, which usually includes newer remixed dance music which keeps going and going. I KNOW for sure that some of my “peeps” aren’t so crazy about Montel Jordan’s ‘This is how we do it’ but will still stick it out while I “raise the roof” …… which happens to be one of my signature moves, by the way.
I digress.
Back to the point. Occasionally, we will end up with some “admirers”.
I say “admirers”, because usually they try to dance their way into the circle.
I say “we”, because it sounds way better than saying Leslie, and besides, it goes straight to her head.
Leslie is a few years younger and is petite and cute and seems to be the type that attracts all kinds…. Of weirdos, that is. I should also say that she attracts regular guys too…. But seeing as she seems to be the only one of us that consistently catches the attention of the opposite sex (and occasionally the same sex) she is the example that I present to you today.
So there we were, dancing our brains out…. Raising the roof… being the girls gone sort-of-wild, when we notice that Les has decided to sit down. We boogie our way over to her seat and demand that she resumes dancing with us. (as I mentioned before… we are ALWAYS there for each other) She says something to the group, but with the music jamming and the general noise level high, we can’t really hear exactly what she’s saying. We assume it’s just some cock and bull excuse as to why she was pooping out on us. We notice that she’s attempting contact again… Wow! ‘She really is a whiner tonight!’, I think to myself. We all look at each other and laugh. After all, our husband-ride will be arriving in ten minutes and we need to get our groove on until the last possible second!
As we all shuffle out the door at the appointed time, we notice that Les keeps rubbing her arm. Good Grief! She is really being extra wimpy! I’ve been “roof raising” all evening and you don’t see me rubbing my arms!
“I've been bitten,” she announces. None of the rest of us had been bitten…. and we didn’t even spray ourselves with deep woods Off! “We were inside all night! How did you get bitten?” someone asks.
She lifts up her sleeve to reveal a large bite mark on her arm. It had teeth marks on it… like people leave…
“How in the heck did you get bitten by a person?”, we inquire. She proceeds to tell us the story of this young guy who kept asking her to dance when she sat down to take a break. She told him she had four kids and was old enough to be his mother much older sister, and that she wasn’t interested and he shouldn’t be either. Somehow, he must have thought that she would be flattered when he said that she was cute enough to bite, and then he did. That is crazy, right?! Thank heavens he didn’t break the skin…. She may have had to go through those painful rabies shots or something.
We asked her why didn’t she tell us when it happened. She came up with some story….
Like she tried to, when we danced up to her, but that we just kept laughing.
Okay, so in hindsight maybe we weren’t there for her in this particular instance. But on the other hand, I’m pretty sure that Karen’s second favorite song, which was sure to be a Rolling Stones tune, was playing when Leslie took her “little break”….
Which is clearly a breach of our dancing rules contract…
So I guess our faux pas and her ‘break’ pretty much cancel out each other. Thank heavens for that!
I surely don’t want to have to find a new posse. Because as I mentioned before, It’s not as easy for me as it is for Rick.
Not to mention all that Botchy-ness!
I received the following e-mail from my BFF Tracy, who as you may recall from last weeks post, just moved to Ireland from the good old US of A...
