We usually don't celebrate every little holiday, but today my husband's office was closed and after a week of watching the stock market rise and fall and the senate bat the bail-out bill back and forth (say that five time fast), he was itching for a vacation.
So we threw caution to the wind, grabbed our beach towels and hung our favorite sign on the door, Out celebrating our annual Make-New-Friends-From-England-Day!
Then we got crazy. I didn't wear my seatbelt . . . or my sunscreen . . . or my rash guard . . . or my board shorts. I swam like a maniac in nothing but my swimsuit and I double-dog dared the sun to do something about it. I got in the car without brushing the sand off my feet and I ate my Bavarian Cream pie before my burger at lunch. I even ordered not just a Mountain Dew, but a Mountain Dew CODE RED, because on holidays I like to live dangerously.
After my husband and I polished off our pie we glanced around.
"Do you think we're going to make any new friends from England today?" I said.
"Why else would we call it MNFFE Day?" he said.
He had a point.
Last year on MNFFE day we were on the streets of New York City watching recruiters from The View trying to find young, hip people to freak-dance on stage during their Chris Brown segment. "Do you have to be young and hip," we asked, "because we can totally clear our calendar." We ended up getting on the show where we met and freak-danced with our first ever official new-friends-from-England, Pam and Ben.
This year we were sitting at a wooden picnic table outside Ted's Bakery, making small talk and waiting for our burgers with the rest of the scantily clad Sunset surf punks. I pulled my hair back into a twisty pony tail and pushed my wild-n-crazy bangs off my forehead with my white rimmed Jackie-O sunglasses.
"Do pitbulls really wear lipstick?" my husband asked.
And just then our second new-friends-from-England arrived. Jules and Nick.
They needed a place to sit and we had an empty wooden bench. The rest is history. We talked story over burgers and fries and immediately connected. I felt it uncanny how strangely our lives intersected even though we live on opposite sides of the Pacific AND the Atlantic ocean (depending on which way you're traveling).
They love the sitcom Lost and took a drive through Waianae where the pilot was filmed and we've actually been lost while taking a drive through Waianae. They had their wedding in Oxford and I found my wedding dress in Oxford. Jules uses crystals to clear out bad chi and I have a niece named Crystal with bad chi.
And get this . . . I have witnessed businessmen strip down to their boxers in Hyde Park simply because the sun came out and they have actually stripped down to their boxers in Hyde Park simply because the sun came out.
But the real clincher was that we both adore Simon Cowell.
It wasn't freak dancing, but we'll always have Ted's Bakery.
(Disclaimer: Some of the information in this story was dramatized for effect. The friends we freak-danced with on The View were actually from Vermont, and my niece Crystal doesn't really have bad chi in that energy karma sense of the word, but I'm pretty sure her flat iron is junk. Don't quote me on that, though. Oh, and my Jackie-O glasses are black.)
4 comments:
Deb you are too funny! I saw you leaving the safety of our townhouse parking lot- being all crazy in your swimsuit! I didn't know it was a holiday or I would have started freak-dancing for you!
Hope you had a good one!
I had no idea it was MNFFED. I'm marking it on next years calendar right now.
No I'm not, that was a lie, I don't even have next years calendar.
Who knew? Man, I feel like the kid at school who sits around listening to everybody talk about the party she wasn't invited to. Next year though. I am on it.
wow---the revelation that the Jackie O sunglasses just ruined the whole image for me:)
And Vermont is New England---so it fully counts on the making friends from Englad- I think.
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