Getting Ready for My Big Date

Remember when you were 17 and the cute boy you liked called and asked to take you to the movie?

And you primped and preened trying to make your acne covered face shine, generously applied blue eye shadow, and artfully arranged the three layered polo shirts with collars standing at attention?

And the excitement you felt when the door bell rang, knowing that this was your big night?

Yeah.  Me neither.*

I do remember the primping part. But I was getting ready to go the movies with my girlfriends (I think I probably saw every chick flick that debuted from 1985 to 1989.  That’s a whole lotta Molly Ringwald).

Of course, we hoped that there might be a cute boy within a twelve mile radius, so we slathered on the mascara and lip gloss.  I tortured my hair with a curling iron, applied massive quantities of styling jell, and then doused it with hair spray.  After all, if there was a hurricane, I wouldn’t want my hair to move.

Now, twenty years later, I’m getting ready for a new kind of date.  I’m having a girlfriend over for lunch.  She’s kind and funny and smart and she laughs at my jokes.  What more can you want?!

So, I’m at it again. 

I’m cleaning and baking and folding and arranging, all in anticipation of the noon hour when she will come over and eat my egg salad sandwich.

Fortunately, I have learned that blue eye shadow isn’t really my look,  so I’ve moved on to baggy jeans and flip flops.

And I haven’t been this excited since the debut of Pretty in Pink.

*One day I’ll have to tell you about the sporty boy on the basketball team who called me a few times and seemed really interested in going on a date until we got our SAT scores back.  And how I learned the painful lesson that cute boys on the basketball team don’t like girls who double their score on the SAT.  I never heard from him again.  I was heart broken for about two days.  If only I had known that Nature Boy was kicking butt in graduate school, I would have gotten over it a lot quicker!