I met the always delightful Stevie Ann for lunch in the East Village, during which she teased me in a comprehensive and knowledgeable fashion.
Her observations and questions were, as always, way too insightful. I spent a large part of the meal with my face down on the table, laughing helplessly and only surfacing to inquire Is this how real grown-ups talk??
She replied I’m just prompting because you don’t know how to play!
Over the course of the afternoon we walked around in the sunshine catching up on all of the news and gossip that has accumulated in the five or six months since our last visit, then stopped at a flea market.
My lucky dress had by then nearly died – the back seam featuring a rip of about eight inches – but I found a vintage dress with tags still on. We both bought new outfits, then changed on the sidewalk in front of the Boys Club (yes, my driving need for modesty is erratic and irrational – I am much more likely to be found half naked on a city sidewalk…. than in my own home).
It is a tremendous honor that Stevie asked me to be her date to the reunion, and took me along to her father’s celebratory birthday dinner. I bought her first legal drink, we’ve been on tour together, performed together, remained close across years, great distances, real and brutal trauma.
Stevie is the only friend who has ever spent the night at my aunt’s house, and one of the very few who has extracted an admission of love from my reticent self. I’m so lucky to know her:
