Sifting The Coals
by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman

Long holiday weekends provide us with a chance to reflect, when we might consider what hideous deed we committed a few lives ago such that we're punished in this incarnation with the Simple Life 2: Road Trip. Paris and Nikki aside, New York once again belongs to New Yorkers as Fleet Week recedes into memory and we wait the nine months to Illegitimate Baby Week. It's wedding season, fishing season, and expose-your-pasty-skin season. The entertainment possibilities are vast and mind blowing. You could stay home and watch the ABC soaps Your Darling, Your Diva, Your One True Love refers to as All My Bianca, Viki's Nine Lives to Live, and Emily in General, Though Nikolas Belongs In A Hospital, but you've got rays to catch and shotgun nuptials to avoid.
 
At a Memorial Day barbecue, you could have this conversation:
 
Friend X: Look at you! You brought…something! You shouldn't have!
You: You're too nice! It's just a little thing I whipped up!
Friend X: Oh…you…really shouldn't have!
 
Or this one:
 
Friend 1: You made these mix CDs?
Friend 2: Yeah, they're great for driving around and singing at the top of my lungs.
You: The last time I heard this Paulie threw me in the kiddie pool. I love this song!
Friend 2: I know.
 
You marvel at the wonderful song recorded before you were born, and that you always have something to talk over with your friends, though you often feel tongue-tied with other people. Your friends notice that as a group you know one another so well you can make mixes of songs you like, and they like, too. This revelation may precede the telling of stories you wish you could edit before they spilled from your friends' lips, but whatever. Isn't it fabulous to have companions who aren't put off by your inability to boil water and your black belt in Trivial Pursuit?
 

©2004 Robin Pastorio-Newman