Girls' Night Out

I missed my girls' night out dinner. There are about six of us -- I'm the oldest of course, by twenty years in one case. Everybody's married but me. I just seem married. I'm not sure if that's a compliment or not.

We started getting together about once a month just because it's nice to have an excuse to hang with your girlfriends without the smell of testosterone. I think it started out as a way to celebrate all our birthdays and then we just decided to keep it going even without an excuse to party.

One of us is an architect who has renovated two of our houses, making them worthy of inclusion in a magazine. One was a Victorian, the other a brick and clapboard ranch that was completely transformed when she finished. I remember being amazed that she was an architect maven who has transformed some ordinary houses into extraordinary homes. All the architects I've known have been guys with a penchant for unusual shoes, ties or jackets with illusions of being the next Frank Lloyd Wright. Or Frank Gehry.

She also reminds me of an Italian Rachael Ray, full of energy, down to earth and very funny. She also dresses with the fashion flair of a soccer mom, since she does that too. Wish I had a house worth renovating and the money to do it. She did her own place, too. One of these days I'll take some pictures.

For one of our girls' nights out a couple of years ago she created a salad that included an array of colorful designer tomatoes and a dressing I'd never tasted before. She has yet to repeat herself and every salad has been something unusual and muy tasty. The problem is she just kind of wings it, so after they're gone, they're gone.

Also in attendance was my friend who has her own ad agency. And a bunch of other marketing and creative peeps like myself. One of the marketing bunch is working for me on a project and got so pissed off today that she hung up on me. That's because I was interrupting her too much. The reason I was interrupting her was because I knew what she was going to say. That pissed her off even more.

We were insulting each other so much that she started complaining about the way I write my emails, claiming that I send them in all caps like I'm screaming at her. Do not. Do too. Do not. Do too. You are so in denial. You are so wrong. 

I have been sending them in boldface type forever. Not caps. NA NA NA NA NA. So when I proved she was mistaken, I sent her a final email that said, "You are SO busted." It was straight out of kindergarten.

Even with a day like that we were still going to go hear Aretha Franklin at Ravinia Festival, the outdoor summer music venue near here. It's only ten bucks to sit out on the lawn, so we planned to have a nice pot luck supper, listen to the Queen of Soul and call it a night.  But it's been raining so much that nobody wanted to sit on the wet grass in the heat and humidity, especially when you never know when it's going to rain again. So we decided to go to a tapas place instead and do the little-twenty-dollar-dishes-you-can-share thing.

Except I ended up not going. I had a good excuse though -- pick one:  I just went to the dermatologist for Botox and my face doesn't move yet.  I was pumping water out of my basement, thanks to all the torential rain and the construction across the street when I struck oil. I had a date with an old boyfriend who wanted to rekindle what we had forty years ago with Viagra. I'm dieting so I can get into my thong bikini. None of the above. All the above.

Whatever. I didn't go. Ironically, it didn't rain again so we could have gone to Ravinia. Meanwhile the girls are probably still at the tapas place talking about me.


P.S. Before I had all the ivy taken off the east and north sides of my house I took a picture of some of it framing my back door. I thought it was kind of quaint, like an English cottage. A hairy English cottage.