Thursday, May. 06, 2004 - 11:32 a.m.
Greetings,
Tonight I am stopping at Schminn Pixie after work for the weekly shopping. It will have to be a whirlwind tour because I need to be home for the Friends finale and pre-finale “highlights” show.
It’s odd, vaguely disturbing, and incredibly sappy of me, but for the past week I have found myself sometimes on the verge of tears thinking that tonight is *it* for the show. There will never be a new season or a new episode. I’ll never tune in on Thursday night, wine cooler in hand, and see them all sitting on the orange couch at Central Perk discussing the latest gossip, craze, or annoying person they ran into ever again.
I’m assuming that the reason I’m so sentimental and squishy about this t.v. show (because, as I keep telling myself half-heartedly, that’s *all* it is), stems from the fact that it is (up until tonight) a continuing, maturing and enduring connection back to 1996 when I met Tommy.
I know Friends came on the air in 1994, but I remember sneering at the thought of 6 yuppies sitting around a coffee shop whining about their lives at the time. I was smug. I had X-Files and Nick at Nite, and the Rug Rats, I didn’t need a boring old network comedy about 6 impossibly beautiful and totally fake people living in NYC.
It wasn’t until Tommy and I were deep into “Our Conversation” and faxing each other about 5 times a day between Connecticut and California (and the screwy three hour time difference), that he suggested I watch Friends one Thursday night.
“Ewww,” I remember thinking. Could this be it finally? A major difference between us? Did he like sappy network television shows? It was during this time he actually even admitted he’d never even seen one episode of X-Files. Mind boggling.
He started talking about Ross and Rachel and that incredible kiss they’d shared at Central Perk when it was raining and after hours and all that jazz while I started talking about how I wished the alien abduction crap would get dropped from the story line and there would be more supernatural, occult flavored episodes, but on the whole Mulder and Scully had it going on. Sexual tension there too.
So, in the spirit of broadening my horizons (because that was a really big part of “Our Conversation”), I tentatively suggested I would watch Friends that coming Thursday and he maybe could watch X-Files on Friday. He offered tosend me a tape with a few Friends episodes on it so I could get some of the “back story”. I suggested I hand pick the first X-Files episode he watched so that he would get some alien and/or government conspiracy episode as his first taste.
The tape arrived full of episodes of Friends, wrestling commercials, and, very oddly, some Latina girl with a big butt dressed in spandex “dancing” to some strange music in front of a house. I don’t remember what episodes there were except for one – the one where Phoebe finds out her “husband” the gay skater, isn’t gay because he wants a divorce so he can marry a girl. I remember thinking how pretty Phoebe was and how much I liked her pink mini dress.
When I inquired (via an amused fax) about the Latina girl, Tommy explained that his roommate Ivan had some strange tastes that he’d rather not go into since it was just before lunch. Enough said.
Well, I was hooked on Friends after that tape. Inspired by Tom’s Thursday night tradition of ordering pizza and buying a six pack of beer on the way home from work and watching the show with friends, I suggested to my sister that I come over on Thursdays and visit with her and my niece and nephew. I’d buy the pizza and the wine coolers, she’d supply the television set and the napkins.
Done deal.
Those were the best Thursday nights of my life. That one season of Friends watched at Penny’s with Bruce and Ciara vying for my attention and laughing at the jokes, even the ones they didn’t get, all of us eating Vic’s pizza and enjoying the hell out of ourselves.
I kept “Our Conversation” printed out in a series of binders which I would bring back and forth from work. It was a Friends night when I first mentioned her future brother-in-law to my sister. I even showed her some of the faxes.
Thursdays were a breath of fresh air in my life. A night out and away from the pressure cooker that my home was becoming. Friends night was a way to extend “Our Conversation” into after work/evening hours.
Even though he was across the country and in a different time zone, I always felt like Tommy was there in spirit with me. An unseen presence on the sofa next to me as I swigged a wine cooler, laughed uproariously at one of Chandler’s jokes, and watched Monica and Rachel compete for the last condom while Richard and Ross wore their girlfriends’ bathrobes and vowed “never to speak of this” in the outside world.
I suppose it’s really no strange coincidence that when I left my ex husband and moved out on my own, it just so happened that my sister’s apartment was up for rent since she had decided to move to the downstairs one with more room for the kids.
It seemed so emphatically right that I would watch the fourth season of Friends in that same living room only now it would be mine and the unseen Tommy would be real and vibrant and sitting next to me eating Vic’s pizza and swigging coolers as Ross and Rachel went on a break.
So here it is seven years later and Tommy and I have made other “impossible” dreams come true. We moved to New Orleans, we got married, we switched careers, we bought a house. And along the way Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe were pretty much weekly visitors. I won’t even go into the “Friends-ys” we’ve had on marathon Sunday afternoons since the advent of the DVD releases.
And what would Thanksgiving be now without Underdog breaking loose from the Macy’s Day parade or a game of touch football for the Geller Cup? (I think if I have an all-time favorite episode of Friends, that Thanksgiving episode would be it. Ross and Rachel were still a couple, Phoebe has on that great “That Girl” tee shirt and her hair up in braids, and Ross and Rachel “bunnying up” and then getting all competitive – perfection.)
So this is my disjointed, rambling, pretty much beside the point homage to the end of an era. Ends are always sad, but the sadness only stems from the fact that they made you so happy in the first place.
I guess I should end this now because, honestly, could I BE any more maudlin? ;)
Thank you, Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Monica and Chandler. You were there for me, all right. And you too, Tommy.
Until next time,
Olrun
