My dear reader, I have some wonderful news for you.

I think I’ve made a new friend!

Since Jennifer moved, the fast and fun times have been fewer and farther between. Then my friend Christy moved away too, and that pretty much left me drinking margaritas and eating like a fucking asshole at Mexican restaurants by myself. And that’s no fun.

(Except I have a really cool boss/surrogate mother who takes me to drag shows and that is fun. She’s so cool she is taking her real daughter to Amsterdam for her 30th birthday and leaving me behind with kids who broke my fucking recliner and ruined my carpet this weekend.)

But lately, I’ve been helping Parker’s class room mom with the kindergarten holiday projects. (Halloween, Thanksgiving feast, upcoming Holiday program) This has required a handful of meet-ups and several phone calls between us two.

There we were at her house, making construction paper papooses for the Thanksgiving gig, and the chick offered me a beer while cracking one open for herself.

Oh yes! A friend who drinks!

I took that as my first sign.

We were chatting and somehow got onto the subject of going to the movies. I don’t know what on earth possessed me, but that’s when I confessed why I don’t care for the movie theater that much.

“Let me tell you, we love our large flat screen TV and blue-ray dvd player. I don’t even want to go to the movies much anymore (though I so totally will for James Bond because who can wait for the dvd and not see Daniel Craig’s big guns for six long months? Not me!) I have this thing with coke and popcorn. It’s a movie must-have for me, but the combination makes me fart and I spend the last 45 minutes of a movie squeezing my ass trying to hold it in.”

After those words came out of my mouth, all I heard was silence.

I thought, shit, shit, shit, not again! When will I learn to hide who I really am until I have bamboozled them into thinking I’m all cool and refined?!

Then I looked up from my papoose-making to see the silence was due to the fact she was laughing so hard she couldn’t breath.

That would be sign number two.

About 20 minutes later, not only were we finished stapling, punching and tying strings to the papooses, but Room Mom finished off her beer too. And that’s when she let out a ginormous, contest-winning burp. There was a three second pause before she realized what she had done and then she gasped and apologized for the 6.5 on the Richter scale burp.

“I can’t believe I just did that in front of you. Where are my manners?”

That’s sign three.

During one of our class project meet-ups, I confessed to the room mom that when I first met her (which actually happened a year ago since our kids went to the same preschool but were in different classes), that I wasn’t sure I liked her.

“You said ‘hi’ to me in a tone that suggested we already knew each other or something.”

I know, I can’t make sense of myself either, but it made sense to her.

“Yeah, I get that a lot. I actually put a lot of people off because of that.”

“Really? Well, I guess I’m open-minded enough to give you a chance because you’ve grown on me and I like you now!”

“Yeah, I’m like a fungus that way.”

So what do we have here: Beer, laughing at my fart stories, burps, and now witty humor. Score!

When I left, she mentioned getting together next week to finish the reindeer antlers and I distinctly remember hearing the word “wine.”

I believe I smell the bloom of a new friendship.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 7:59 am and is filed under You Got To Have Friends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.