girlfriends...

In the world of trying to meet men, sometimes you meet princes and sometimes frogs.  And sometimes you meet other princesses.  And that is a wonderful thing.

Tomorrow, I get to hang out with one of my best girlfriends, J-Red.  We've been friends for over 10 years now - and this is the story of how we met.

Back in the late 90's, speed-dating was still a thing that people whispered about, wondered about and read New York Time's articles about.  I had just moved to a new city, and wanted to throw myself out into the scene.  So I found my local Jewish speed-dating event, in a part of the city I didn't know well, showed up to the Jewish Community Center at the appropriate time and found a handful of people standing in the darkened JCC wandering where the hell the event was.

You see, the event organizer from the JCC had neglected to give us the location of the event, and we had all assumed it was at the JCC. 

Five people stood around, shrugged their shoulders, looked at the ground and prepared to head out, defeated.  Two people whipped out their cell phones, started making calls and got to business.  Those two people - J-Red and I - gave each other the acknowledging nod, coordinated a game plan, conferred, then went out to the neighborhood in search of the event.  And found it.

By the time we arrived at the local coffee shop hosting the event, I knew I'd made a new friend.  I wasn't even worried about asking her for her phone number. 

The organizers tried to give us a hard time, as they'd achieved the desired equilibrium of men & women, and we would disrupt that.  J-Red and I were not worried about equilibrium, and made that clear.  We couldn't have presented a more united front to the girl at the registration desk if we'd planned it -- she didn't stand a chance against us!  You want us to come back?  You want us to give you good word of mouth?  You'll let us in. 

Somehow, during the breaks of the evening and conferring over David #9, we swapped phone numbers and promised to keep in touch. Magically, we did.  The last ten years of friendship with J-Red brought LOTS of adventures (including a de-pantsing episode one Christmas Eve that forever convinced a man we were an evil, evil duo), and ultimately a wonderful husband and 2 gorgeous children to J-Red.  I wouldn't trade my friendship J-Red for any of the guys I met that night.  I'll remind her of that over our mani/pedi excursion tomorrow.