Girlfriends and Sex

I need a cigarette. Yeah - it was that good. I think I'm even glowing a little.

Last night my girlfriends and I donned our cutest skirts, slung our summer bags over our shoulders and made the pilgramage that was long overdue for all of us. We finally went to church Sex and the City. Oh mah gawd. I can tell you that if I had waited to see it on DVD or pay-per-view I would have found it to be a good movie. But the electricity between my girlfriends and me was on high excitement, our giddiness to be out of the house/dressed up/at a chick flick made the energy palpable, the movie was suddenly great and when our friend, Heather, casually whipped out a dainty silver flask and topped our Diet Cokes off with a little somethin' somethin' it turned the evening into a rare thing: pure girliness.

We shrieked at the right moments, we squealed when Mr. Big bought Carrie the palatial apartment, we sighed over the first appearance of the Manolos and we clapped and hooted at the brief, but steamy, full frontal scene. Have you seen it? An Adonis in an outdoor shower made a naughty appearance that nearly caused my contacts to dry up - I was that loathe to blink and miss it.

Afterward, in the theater restroom, we met up with four other girlfriends. They instantly knew it was our group that was the loud and raucous gaggle of women in the front of the theater. "Wow - and we thought we were crazy," they said. "We actually smuggled in a bottle of wine." That set us off - we let out a simultaneous scream of laughter and Heather whipped out her flask. Which sealed the deal - none of us were going to head home and finish the last load of laundry or clean the dinner dishes inevitably left for us to take care of or crawl into bed and watch reruns of Sex alone.

No, we all made our way to an adorable Japanese joint and had cosmos and sushi. Which was even more fitting than you think (if you haven't seen the movie) because Samantha at one point makes homemade sushi and lays on her table, artfully covered in California rolls in order to surprise her boyfriend (the steamy but limp noodle Jared). She had a tiny little lotus flower topped with sashimi on her hoo haw which made me snort out loud. I elbowed my friends and said it would definitely be eating sushi in the rainforest if I tried to nestle a roll there. My husband would have to do some major clearcutting to get to his lotus flower.

We spent the next few hours at our joined tables talking sex, perimenopause, and childbirth. We debated the, er, deforestation of our rainforests - whether or not massive clearcutting is sexy or just weird. The age divide definitely played into that vote - and we clanked our martini glasses together in the spirit of girlfriends.

Our kids will grow up and leave us, and we may or may not all be married to the same men in twenty years - but good girlfriends will be with us until we die - in my case with a martini glass in one hand and a bottle of tanning lotion in the other (I am taking up excessive drinking, tanning and smoking once I hit 75).

Now, does anyone have a light?