MWF Seeking BFF (25 page)

I’ve eaten three slices of pizza and one cupcake before I notice the clock. It’s 10:45. Nearing my bedtime and long past Matt’s. I never imagined my 7
P.M.
call time would keep a group of strangers here so late. It’s the sign of women who have been seriously craving some female bonding. As pleased as I am that the evening is a hit, I’m wondering if there is a polite way to kick them out. It’s a school night, people! But Jackie is deep in conversation with Margot about what wedding dresses would work for her body. She’s getting married next May, on the same day as Amanda, who’s grilling Brynn with questions of health benefits. Amanda is waiting on a job offer from a small consulting firm, and Brynn is in HR at a mammoth company. She has lots of insights—on timing, retroactive coverage, and similarly titillating topics—all of which Amanda is eating up.

I close the door behind my last guest at 11:30 and check my phone, knowing Matt must be itching to get home, if he’s even awake. There’s a text from my mom. “Please call as soon as they leave. Matt is sound asleep.” I call and give her the all clear. Ten minutes later Matt sleepwalks into the kitchen, eats a slice of homemade pizza, and crashes.

The next morning there’s an email to the group from Mia. “I’d be happy to host the next one. Sushi night?”

And a bona fide cooking club, maybe even a new group of friends, is born.

“Okay, you’re a priest and a nun. Go.”

Andy runs up to me, flailing his arms. “Father, Father, I don’t know what to do!” He’s using his best girly voice, and I immediately take on the role of priest.

“What’s wrong, my child?” My hands are hooked together and raised chest-level like the Von Trapp Family Singers. I don’t know why, but since I’ve never actually interacted with a priest, this is how I imagine they stand when on the clock. Maybe because Maria was a nun.

“I’m having these strange feelings … for a woman of the convent.”

“Please, take a seat,” I say.

“Have you ever encountered this problem before?”

“Well, there was this one other sister …”

“And by sister, do you mean a nun or an African American woman?”

“Both, actually,” I say. “She went by the name of Sister Mary Clarence.”

“Oh yes, I think I remember her,” Andy’s high-pitched alter-ego says. “As portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg?”

“And … scene!” Kimmi, our teacher, cuts us off on a high note.

It’s week four of my improv class at Second City, a school that boasts alumni including Tina Fey, Steve Carell, and Chris Farley. This is the first scene I’ve done that hasn’t made me want to run away. It’s also one of the only where I was allowed to speak. Our inaugural class was made up entirely of getting-to-know-you games, the second was silent scenes, and the third was gibberish. That was a nightmare. “You’re raking leaves and you’re feisty,” my teacher told me. You know the song “Nothing” from
A Chorus Line
? The one where Diana Morales can’t bring herself to “be a table, be a sports car, ice cream cone”? That’s how I felt. I proceeded to make my best raking motions while simultaneously shaking my head and growling. Is that even what feisty looks like? Unclear.

Despite the fact that I’m most certainly not going to be the next Liz Lemon, I am actually starting to enjoy these classes, if not so much for the activity as for the company. There are some definite potential friends here, and because we have class every week I can get to know them before bringing the relationships to the friend-date level. Consistency is one of the tenets of friendship, and the fact that I can count on three hours with these people every Tuesday night is helping to solidify relationships.

There’s also the fact that we keep making asses of ourselves in front of each other. I mentioned earlier the “click accelerators” that Rom and Ori Brafman pinpoint in their book
Click.
Improv is the perfect place to put the vulnerability accelerator to the test. I may not be revealing my greatest fears or weaknesses,
but standing up in front of a crowd and acting a fool—and having them actually laugh
with
not
at
me—is a fast track to trust.

Kimmi demonstrated this very truth in our second class. First, everyone in the room had to stand in front of the group and tell a funny story. (Mine involved my 6-year-old self driving around with my mother, who would yell “Move, Jerk!” or “Nice turning signal, Jerk!” or “Learn to drive, Jerk!” until I asked her how it happened that we were always behind the same person.) For the second round, we told embarrassing stories. (Me, twenty years old, too many shots of Beefeater Gin, vomit. Tale as old as time.)

“You might have laughed at the funny story,” Kimmi told us afterward. “But you probably felt a moment of connection with the embarrassing one. You felt humiliated for him, or you flinched or covered your eyes. You
felt
for him. And that’s what you want the audience to do for you.” Apparently winning over a crowd isn’t all that different from wooing a BFF.

I didn’t know this going in, but improv is a male-dominated art form. In my class of twenty-two, we have seventeen boys and five girls. I was disappointed at first—No ladies? No friends? No, thank you!—but being in the minority has bonded us women. And I’m not necessarily averse to making male friends. Andy’s great, and there’s Eddie, who’s gay and hilarious and a BFF waiting to happen.

As for the women, Jenny is an itty-bitty thing who gives the impression of a porcelain doll until she opens her mouth and always, every single time, goes for the dirty. If she’s not sitting on a toilet, she’s getting a bikini wax. Or getting it on. It’s so unexpected out of her small frame that it always gets a laugh. In real life, Jenny is a producer at a local news station. We’ve discussed the possibility of getting together with our
husbands—hers is a Matt, too—but nothing has come to fruition yet.

Right now the most promising prospect is Rachel. She’s 22 and just graduated from the University of Iowa. On paper, she’s another mini-me. Aside from the first name, her middle name is Levin while my married name is Levine. This much we figured out in the first week. During the following week we discovered that our moms are in the same quilting group. Then that we were in the same sorority. She lives in Evanston, where I went to college, and loves all the same TV I do. Though I haven’t had good luck with dates in her age group thus far, Rachel seems like a winner. Having weekly class in common gives us a solid context in which to anchor our relationship.

The fact that Rachel comes equipped with a pal for my mom gives her a leg up on my other potential BFFs. I’ve joked about mother-daughter double dating before, but Rachel and I have already discussed it as a real possibility. Our moms are friendly in their quilting group, and Rachel lives at home. It only makes sense that my mother and I would head out to Evanston for a ladies brunch.

My mom has been continuing her own BFF search alongside mine, though she wouldn’t explicitly call it that. She befriended Shelly, the fellow widow with whom she said she could go on cruises back when I was friendless and totally jealous of her. Then she secured a seat at the lunch table with a group of quilters. (Even quilters have cliques! I can’t stop picturing Regina George, fifty years later, instructing her minions that “On Wednesdays, we wear pink.”) She belongs to some three different quilt guilds. It appeared she was having it easy until I started to notice the loneliness in her voice from time to time. There are threads of my own story in my mother’s,
and I want to encourage her to buck up and go for it when she gets invitations to parties where she doesn’t know anyone. Still, her hesitance is about more than the difficulty of meeting new people.

Mom hates being “the token widow” and I can’t blame her. (When my father first died, I dreaded being “the one with the dead dad” in my group of friends. I don’t know why this concern took such hold of me, but in the haze of grief we latch on to irrational fears.) Take a few weeks ago, when she went to her best friend’s son’s wedding.

“The hardest part was not having someone to zip up my dress,” she said.

What can I say to that?

If you look past the résumés, Rachel is actually much funnier and more outgoing than I. She’s supergoofy, in a self-deprecating and endearing way. She’s constantly tripping herself up in scenes and then trailing off with some collection of unrelated words. “I. We. Yeah. Lunch. Fail.” Even her gibberish, which sounds like a poor attempt at German—“Flargen bargen fargen”—makes me laugh. And she’s just enough younger than me that she has no difficulties with friend-making. She’s proof of what I’ve come to call the Second City Factor.

The gist of my Second City theory (which is completely unrelated from the improv school) is that it’s in your second city after college when friend-making gets tough. When young 20-somethings arrive in their first post-grad home, they’re surrounded by other real-world freshmen in the same boat. Everyone’s a novice in the workforce, unfettered by college classes or midterm papers, looking for buddies to drink, gossip, and go to the movies with. Making new friends is easy—everyone is more or less looking for the same thing.

The decision to move to the second post-college city (or suburb, or town), however, is usually made independent of friends. No matter if you do it for love, career, family, or school, the second move is on your own terms. And given that you’ve probably got a few post-grad years under your belt, you’re not guaranteed a sea of new-in-town friend prospects this time around. Plenty of the companions you’re looking for have lived in your new city for years and have already filled their BFF quota. Suddenly, you’re floundering in the search for that certain someone, despite having been surrounded by plenty of perfect someones all your life. The trick is to find other second-city dwellers or slowly infiltrate the established ranks. That’s when making friends becomes the tricky dating dance: Am I coming on too strong? When can I call her again? Did she like me, or did she like like me?

I’m currently grappling with my second city, while Rachel—and most of our improv classmates—are in their first.

That’s the other thing. I’m one of the oldest students in the class. From what I can tell, Beginning Improv is a course that people sign up for when they still live at home and are trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. My class is mostly filled with aspiring actors/comedians/writers who have day jobs (sometimes) but not careers. Being a 28-year-old professional with no dreams of the stage seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

During our mid-class break, Rachel and I have been taking shopping trips to the Walgreens across the street, where she’ll tell me about her most recent text exchange with Bill or pre-class dinner with Josh.

“You and Bill text?” I’ll ask, baffled by the ease with which she socializes with our fellow improvisers during the off hours.

“Sure,” she’ll say.

“When did that start?”

“I don’t know, I got his number sometime. Probably at drinks after class. We don’t say anything interesting.”

“Did you just text him randomly one day? Or did he contact you? Was it weird?” Each week I grill her for the specific logistics of how she has already turned our entire class into a band of BFFs. It comes easy to her, not like something that needs to be overanalyzed, and I’m starting to realize that I sound both insecure and generally socially inept. So, after four weeks, I decide to curb the inquisition and make a move of my own.

The next day, via email, I ask my younger self out. We put a pre-class dinner date on the books.

The further I get into this year, the clearer the necessity of regularity becomes. It’s like Shasta Nelson’s formula: Twice a month for three months makes a friend. A few of my semi-successful girl-dates—Muffy, Pam, Morgan—haven’t evolved into real relationships because we have nothing that reliably brings us together. If it were important enough to both of us, we’d make plans to ensure some consistency, but that has to be a two-way street. There aren’t enough days in a month for me to schedule bi-weekly dates with everyone—at least not if I ever want to enjoy a quiet night with Matt, or yoga, or
30 Rock
—so I’ve focused mostly on the ladies who I absolutely adore (Jillian) and those who reciprocate my interest in our friendship (Hilary, Margot). The other contenders at the front of the pack are those who I already see regularly (Hannah at book club, my co-workers in the office). And hopefully my new cooking club will manufacture some regularity with that promising crowd.

The difference between the monthly consistency of book club versus the weekly nature of improv is that it takes four times as long to get to the same place. So while I’ve belonged to two book clubs since January, I’m just now establishing independent relationships with some of the members. In New York, my fellow book clubbers became some of my favorite people. They came to my wedding, they’ve visited me since my move. We had such girl-crushes on our nerdy little gang that we’d plan mid-month nonbook gatherings, just so we’d get more time to love each other.