As another Friday approaches, it occurs to me that I completely forgot to write about my antics last Friday. And since my weekend wasn’t entirely lame for once, I think I should share.

Tim was hassled into participating in his annual parish musical. I’ve known Tim for 2 years and I dated him for about 8 months of that time, and I have never been able to picture the boy singing and dancing. I know he’s done theater in the past but… he’s stoic and square-shouldered and was in the military. He drinks Budweiser and plays pool and drives a truck. He’s not the guy you’d expect to give his regards to Broadway.

So of course Mel and I had to go see this spectacle. Friday night at 7:00 we trooped into the school gymnasium and sat in the very back.

“I’m going to go get us some beer,” Mel said.

“Here?”

“Duh, these are Catholics,” she pointed out. “See, those people have wine. There will be beer.”

She went to the concession stand and came back with two cups of wine and a pissed-off look. “No beer,” she grumbled, handing me a cup. “This is going to be impossible without more booze.”

After a moment’s discussion, I handed her the keys to the Jeep and she took off, leaving me alone in a gym full of sober Catholics while Father Whoever prattled on about the history of the parish and how all the numbers in this musical revue were part of the parish history and blar-dee-blar-blar-blar. When the curtain finally came up, Mel still hadn’t come back. The revue started at the beginning of the 20th century and ostensibly followed the journey of three generations of a family growing up in the parish, telling stories through popular songs. Tim came onstage in 1928.

Oh. My God. He was wearing an argyle sweater and some sort of fedora, and I don’t know if he forgot to change into his dress shoes or what but the man was wearing SNEAKERS with his khakis. I almost choked on what was left of my crappy wine. And then he started singing “Ain’t We Got Fun” and danced the Charleston. I could never have imagined it in my wildest dreams – and back in the day, I had some wild dreams about that boy.

Mel arrived back sometime in the middle of the Great Depression, and thank God Prohibition was over because she’d brought a pack of cranberry martinis in little bottles. Woo!

Scenes passed and we worked our way through the booze. When Tim came onstage in the 1950s wearing a white dinner jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, we picked up our phones and started texting.

“That jacket is pretty damn sexy!” I said. “Those glasses are HOT!” Mel wrote.

In the 1960s he sang part of “The Twist” in a montage and we almost fell over when he did a pretty decent Chubby Checker voice neither of us imagined he had in him. Mel wrote him after that number, saying we wanted to throw our panties on the stage but we were sitting too far back.

The cast geared up for the 1970s by lining up behind the audience while the narrator spoke onstage. “He’s right behind us!” I told Mel. “On my right! Should we wave?”

“Nah, he probably doesn’t have his phone on so he didn’t get our texts. He probably doesn’t know we’re here.”

The cast became flower children and hippies and pranced – PRANCED, I tell you – up onto the stage and sang “Let the Sun Shine In.” In the eighties, he was the policeman in the Village People for “YMCA,” and Mel and I were the only ones in the whole audience who made the letters with our arms and sang along.

We were also probably the only people in the audience under forty, and definitely the only ones who’d had cranberry martinis in little bottles.

He was a raver in the nineties and I don’t even remember what else. Mel and I stood up and cheered the loudest when the curtain went down, then went out to the lobby to see if he’d come out. After a few minutes we got impatient, figured he hadn’t checked his phone, and walked outside.

“There’s his truck. We could just wait there like groupies and he’ll feel special.”

“Is it locked?” We try the doors. “Damn.”

“Why?”

“We should sit in there and make out. That would be funny.”

Yes, Mel was drunker than I was, for once. We settled for scribbling notes on the back of the program and sticking it under the windshield wiper. Tim did come out and see us and we got hugs – I think he was pretty surprised we had come. No one really goes to those things, he said, and pointed out that he’d told me last week I didn’t have to come.

“I don’t have to listen to you anymore, ” I said with a wink. “And I loved it and wouldn’t have missed it. Did you know we were here?”

“I got the text messages and I thought BEN was here,” he said, naming Mel’s husband and his best friend.

“You didn’t check and see who they were from?” we asked.

“Well I figured if you guys were here he had to be here.”

“Hmph,” Mel said. “He wouldn’t show his face at one of these things. You’re stuck with us.”

Kiss on the cheek, and Tim’s off to a cast party and Mel and I head to the bar to meet some of her work friends… and that’s another fun story.

It’s nice to know you can become friends with not only someone who happens to be your ex-boyfriend, but who also happens to be the person who hurt you the deepest you’ve ever been hurt in your life. You guys think I’m in some pain about E? Pssht. I was off the deep end and dead to the world because of Tim, for months on end. It’s been a year and a half now, and time heals a little. We have to be civil to one another at least, because my best friend and his best friend happen to be husband and wife, and at first even civil was hard – for me anyway. But now I can spend the first half of a Friday night getting tanked in a school gymnasium, watching him in a goofy musical and loving it, railing on him afterward, and then dropping a kiss on his cheek while I go off to a bar to flirt with strangers.

Maybe there is hope.

I was so excited about having salon day today! I love getting new color done and getting a new haircut with no shaggy ends, and that nice feeling of a professional blow-dry for 2 days.

HOW HARD IS IT TO COPY A PICTURE?

I don’t usually post in rage, but I am very upset. I know I have thick hair and I know you need to thin and texturize it to keep it from getting puffy, but that does NOT mean you cut it 3 inches shorter than THE PICTURES I GAVE YOU! If I could have seen what Mr. Fabulous (replacement of my old stylist) was doing to the back of my head I would have stopped him, but the front looked okay – how was I to know he was doing stacked layers back there? After all, THEY WEREN’T IN THE PICTURES! Yes, that is a plural. I gave him two pictures, one front and one side. Nowhere in the pictures were there stacked layers like this. Nowhere in the pictures did the hair on the back of the head end up three inches above jawline.

All the time I was sitting in the chair I was so happy because the front looked nice and the color is fantastic, all smiles. When he was done and spun me around with a hand mirror, I think my jaw landed in my lap. I made some sort of comment along the lines of:

“Wow, the color looks great. And the shape of the back will look really nice when it grows out.”

And then I got attacked with something called an anti-humectant. It turns out to be a glue-like substance called a pomade, and it was fluffed through my hair – roots too – before I could run. I HATE having product in my hair. It is sticky and yucky and if Mr. Fabulous would have asked before further violating my head I would have defended my butchered hair from the onslaught. But no. Of course not.

I go to the front to pay and everyone gathers round to see what lovely color I have and how the stylist has solved the problem of my too-thick hair that gets very puffy when it dries. There are ooohs and aaahhhs as I paste on a smile and turn around.

“Call me if you have any questions!” he says cheerfully. “You look fabulous!”

“Yeah, I think that back part will grow out nicely,” I say. “And then it will look like the picture.”

My Silent Prayer: Grow hair, grow!

I toss the cash on the counter and head out with a wave to Mr. Fabulous. I still left a decent tip because I do love the color, and the haircut might be called cute despite the fact that IT WASN’T LIKE THE PICTURE. Driving in the open Jeep with glue – er, anti-humectant – in my hair is awful because every time I run my hand through my hair to pull it out of my face, it feels sticky and disgusting.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to hop in the shower and wash away my lovely salon blow-dry just to get this gunk out of my too-short hair.