It's a Birthday On Earth Day

Today is Earth Day! And yes, this glorious day is significant and worthy of that childish and inflammatory exclamation point because one, Mount Eyjafallajokull is still erupting its consonants all over Reykjavik’s largest known collection of The Sugar Cubes debut album on cassette, a pile of plastic rectangles that quietly sits in a molding box in Bjork’s high school boyfriend’s crawl space, next to the decomposing bodies of all the squeaky women who could never replace her.

Who else could possibly be that emotionally attached to a woman who sounds like a melting Baby Alive with a Klezmer band inserted in its faux anal canal? Who could ever have straight-faced, post-prom sex with a chick who resembles a waterlogged pile of discarded American Girl dolls in a twice-raped coal mine? The earth is yelling people and we should sit up and listen with our Zale diamond-dripping earlobes before it’s too late to take another off road excursion on that screeching ATV that grand daddy’s paltry inheritance bought to replace the love he never felt for you.

It is also a big deal because, I, Dotty, or as my husband loves to call me, “Always Needs A Nap Nancy”, am an official member of The Green Team at Otto’s school and will now try to spend my spare time foot massaging Mama Earth’s bucolic bunions instead of sleep- standing in the Target toy aisle surrounded by a mountain of Chinese-made choking hazards, a mammoth mass of molded plastic panaceas for the unpleasant child that have littered all over the last three years of my life.

That also means I will forever be smoke-signaling to my friends and blog buddies about recycling tampon boxes, saving energy by mountain biking to the new job you should get selling bio-degradable window treatments that smell like a murky, thrice-cleaned fish tank, decreasing your offensively large carbon footprint in the shape of this season’s Manolo Blahnik Jeweled Napa Sandal and encouraging you and your family of fifteen environmentally unfriendly bottom feeders to move into a hand woven yurt with nothing more than a case of Quinoa and an itchy Hemp pashmina.

Happy birthday, Mother Earth. May we all be a little more conscientious and caring when ordering an In-N-Out Double-Double animal style, large fries and a Diet Coke while idling in the bright yellow Hummer that really tweets "me".

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself and Monsters and Bears and Undercooked Meat and...

Bionic Woman was, and still is, my all-time favorite TV show, beating out Little House On The Prairie, the original Star Trek with a horny and girdled William Shatner, Family, starring my tomboy idol Kristy McNichol and the ever-charming and implausible, Small Wonder. Every Tuesday night I would plop my bony ass down in front of our black and white Zenith, an appliance the size of a poorly proportioned fake I.D. and pretend that I had long blond, feathered hair and lived above a barn in Ojai, California. Jamie Summers was my heavenly heroine with supersonic hearing, my tall drink of bone-crushing goodness in a world of thirsty thugs, the desperately needed period at the end of my poorly conjugated, run-on sentence.

With no apparent signs of discomfort, she could jog a one-minute mile in a poncho and camel-toe jeans as tight as a tube sock, casually open a can of tuna with perfectly rounded French-tipped finger nails, engage in a touching and committed, non-sexual relationship with a Big Foot that looked like a runaway whale turd and somehow believably throw a poorly-painted Styrofoam boulder the distance of a 7-11 parking lot.

I always viewed her as invincible and unstoppable until the fateful “Doomsday Is Tomorrow” episode in which Alex 7000, the naughty and negative computer, tries to destroy the world of gas-guzzling Cadillacs, colorful kaftans and key parties. In that episode, Jamie must save the day by getting to the computer’s main frame in a warehouse somewhere near Chatsworth, off the 5 freeway, just past the 110 interchange.

After Jamie easily breaks into the building using her left pinky knuckle and a light exhale, Alex, the all-knowing desktop of destruction, cuts the lights and begins to play recordings of hissing sounds on the loud speaker. Little did the worshipful audience know at the time, that Jamie, the queen of slow-mo karate kicks, was petrified of snakes? She can barely make it up a flight of stairs without falling to her rebuilt knees and crying WD-40 tears.

It was at that moment that I realized we all have fears, rational of otherwise, that must be respected and addressed. My pile of fears is as high and wide as Kirstie Alley at Willie Nelson’s annual back-tax bake sale. The list includes spiders, cockroaches, Kentucky Fried Chicken, curdled milk, rusty vans, heights higher than three inches, white high heels before AND after Labor Day, jogging braless, yellow teeth and trailer park pedophiles.

I bring this up because Otto has spent the last two summers being very fearful of the ocean and its intimidating Siamese twin, the wave. We have been lucky enough to spend countless hours out at the beach the last few years, walking in the gold-sprinkled sands of Malibu hoping to spot celebrities dogpaddling and de-toxing. But, soon after Otto learned to walk on these gilded granules he became petrified when the waves would wash up toward him. Seeing that we are a Southern California family and a handful of Otto’s uncles are as proficient on surfboards as the new crop of 2010 debutantes are on stripper poles, we want Otto to be Point Breakin’ before his fourth birthday.

This past Sunday, as Dave readied himself for another tireless day of preproduction on his directorial debut (more to come on this amazing factoid) Otto and I decided to tag along on a trip to the beach with our neighbors, the ones we like to call, The Young and the Restless. I guess when you choose to have a baby before an age that rhymes with “dirty” you have more energy, motivation and inclination to leave your house and do cool shit.

We arrived at Paradise Cove, a stretch of Malibu marvelous-ness and set up a super cool sand camp. Slathered with SPF 3000 and a new Paul Frank monkey beach ensemble Otto looked ready for recreation. I didn’t expect him to do much more than build sandcastles and lure in the ladies with cold beers and bedroom eyes. But, to my surprise he asked to go check out the water and my heart skipped a bikini-clad beat. We walked down close to where the sea foam settled on the wet sand and with Otto in my arms, I went ankle deep to show him how tremendous the frigid Pacific could be in the early spring. Within minutes my toes went numb, my body was courting a crush with hypothermia and Otto ran and splashed like a bodacious Baywatch babe. I was so proud and relieved that I almost snapped off my frozen shinbones and waved them in a hobbled victory lap.

Although Dave and I had clearly been a bit bummed that Otto hated the waves during our last trip to the beach, I never spent any real time worrying about it. I knew we would continue our sandy sojourns regardless and that eventually, Otto would either grow out of his fear or fully morph into his manic mother, a woman who, as a naïve eight-year old, trembled through Jaws on opening night, forever preferring pool decks to Poseidon adventures.

As a parent we cannot one hundred percent protect our children from unknown fears, especially the colorful ones in their imaginations or the dark one in ours. It is our job to hold them and hug them and reassure them that there are no polar bears in the refrigerator and sharks cannot swim in a shag rug. But for the record, I see nothing wrong with encouraging them to avoid clowns and crack heads, no matter how fun the circus is.

Ultimately, I want Otto to be able to run wild and free without a care in the world. I just have to make sure that the world sees me standing right behind him and that it knows that I will always be an inch away when the waves get too knarly and the water is too cold.

Holey Cow!

The morning after his Masters triumph, Phil Mickelson reportedly hit up a Krispy Kreme drive-through in Augusta—this one's for the family!—while wearing his green jacket. – CNN.com

What is the difference between Phil Mickelson eating a glazed donut after his Master’s win

and Tiger Woods eating one after his fourth place finish?

The number of holes.

Speaking of holes, my favorite glazed one is back! Welcome home, Courtney!

Nothing says "Happy Birthday" like rubber bracelets and leggings and frosted tips and wrestling shoes and...

Even though most people feel a simple happy birthday call is good enough for a real friend I feel it simply will not do. I wanted to give her a much-deserved tiara made of tangerine-sized blood diamonds and a new hybrid helicopter but the Toyota made chopper is a bit tricky to fly without break pedals and three missing propellers. As for the rapturous rocks, Leonardo DiCaprio fucked that up with his South African accent and ruggedly handsome intentions, never stopping to think about all the diamond-less ladies frothing at the bit.

I wanted to give Liza, my partner in lifelong best friendship-ness, something I hope she would really need. So I really wracked my brain, going over a mental shopping list that looked like a T.J. Maxx sale bin. I thought about all the gift possibilities but fell brutally short, like Herve Villachaize pole-vaulting for his tiny country, Fantasy Island, during the 1980 Olympic Summer Games in Moscow. What do you give to a woman who has helped define you with a bazillion-year friendship peppered with vicious loyalty and unmatched kindness? What do you throw at a girl who has never, in the two decades plus that you have loved her ever spoken to you as if your were a pair of disposable knee-highs with reinforced toes? How do you pay a gal back for letting you borrow a closet full of the latest and greatest early 80’s fashions while all you had to lend her was a creaky drawer full of Salvation Army cardigans once belonging to the corpses of smelly old timers?

How can I possibly burp up a silver-plated candle stick or a kitschy floral cheese platter when she has handed over to me years of urinating belly laughter, Maybelline Great Lash guffaws, an uncommon love of the wine cooler, a myriad of sinful summers at The Cape, the second worst Florida sunburn ever recorded, bungled bong hit lessons and a plethora of Cabriolet convertible, Diet Coke-driven adventures?

Ahh, what is my present to this perfectly appointed post-pubescent pal? It is a long ago, little snapshot of the sexy little conjugal cave off of her parent’s kitchen area, a place that had everything a gaggle of teenage troublemakers could want; a sectional sofa large enough to fit eight shrieking freshman with a conveniently questionably pull-out bed, a 27-inch color television with a VCR and the ever-illusive cable subscription only the coolest of parents could possibly allow. This tiny guestroom/TV room housed more hand jobs, hickeys and hangovers than a Tennessee trailer park, teaching a new generation of horny harlots all about the birds, the bees and a healthy handful of snakes.

So, to celebrate Liza’s birthday I want to take her down memory lane to re-experience one of my firsts that occurred in the romper room of regret. No gutter brains, it’s not what your dirty little minds are dry humping right now. I did not lose my big V in that den of inequity, like most of our prom-loving pals. The loss of my mangled womanhood, my cyber friends, is another story involving a water bed, an Iron Maiden black light poster and a future resident of the California Department of Corrections Mostly Likely To Re-Offend List.

Unwrap the gift that keeps on dancing and picture the two of us imitating Madonna, the gypsy of gyrating, on top of that crunchy couch, dressed like little beggar girls waiting for a bus to the whorehouse in the next town over!

Celebrate, Liza! It’s your birthday!

Communication Breakdown

Where do I begin but at the beginning? A week ago Sunday our entire Matrix imploded. As Neo was busy banging hookers and Trinity was enjoying her newfound life writing an irreverent knitting blog and giving birth to virtual babies, my portal pooped out. For some mysterious reason there was a flood under our street, ironically occurring in a city that is perpetually dry of rain but wet with desperation. This technological oddity, in turn, caused the AT&T service that we have to revert back to olden times. For six days and nights, we had no Internet, no phone, no television, no cable and no cell service.

Yes, we were the techie-loving assholes that had just recently signed up for AT & T U-Verse, a new, state-of-the-art service that combines all your communication needs into one package and one wire. One button to push, one bill to pay, you get the pitch. You get the hook. But, there is a major risk in giving all that power to one small, fragile wire. What if, God forbid, that all-important little hot piece of cable decides the Hollywood life is not for her after all, that perhaps she was not prepared to suck her way to the middle, that she will never be tall enough, long enough, loose enough or dumb enough to really make it, she could very well just pack up her tiny tote bag and catch a bus to normal, taking with her the only happiness most people will ever know, the ability to take frivolous Facebook quizzes and cringe at the hourly, emotional, Sandra Bullock updates on CNN.com.

The first day of my luxurious Little House On The Prairie life was spent waiting for six hours inside our cramped cabin for a technician to come and save me from a life of hand-churned butter blisters and the precarious pastime of reading bible passages by the light of an incendiary oil lamp. Otto was on his second week of spring break. Did you hear me? He was NOT in school while I waited for some dude in coveralls and shit-kickers to rescue us from ourselves using wire cutters, a dull, #2 pencil and cobweb-covered kneepads. I do not have a back yard or a pool or a trampoline or a tree house or a Slip ‘n’ Slide to entertain my small child with. I have a shitty, poorly graded patch of grass-like substance in front of an apartment, next to a walkway that is as dangerous and unattractive as a Jesse James paramour before the requisite round of antibiotics and Karen Silkwood shower. Being told to sit tight in a confined space with a toddler who favors noogies to napping is asking a lot.

It turned out the problem was external, a fancy, new-fangled term used by Jamie, the first of many specialists to enter our new lives in the old world. After what seemed like a month on Survivor-City Dump, Jamie tells me, “We don’t need to get inside, Ma’am. This here trouble’s under the street.”

What? Otto and I could have been having the time of our lives at the Natural History Museum or the train park or the DMV instead of sitting on a dirty rug and having staring contests with dried up Play-Doh balls and used Starbucks straws? The finger food fight and the Cheddar Goldfish Derby was an unnecessary activity? The fourth vacuuming in an hour could have been prevented if say, one of your people called on my non-working phone to tell me that I didn’t need to be home for the disaster relief to begin?

After discovering the first of many colossal mistakes made by Ma Bell’s predecessor I tried to regain my composure and not shoot hate lasers from my puffy eyes. While I sat in my own waste accented by Old Navy Sweatpants that looked more cleaning rag that workout gear, a large group of scruffy, overwhelmed AT & T magicians showed up in battered trucks to crawl into my manhole and begin a weeklong process of replacing telephone wires from 1934. Pre-World War II technology was not mentioned in the brochure when my husband invited Big Brother into our lives. And being desperate, nosey and bored I learned all about the dubious ways of the countries largest Tele-Com network provider after I skulked over to the circle of repair men dressed in my best Greek Taxi driver ensemble and begged then to fix the problem before American Idol aired two days later.


To make a very long and painful story shorter and just as painful, last week’s American Idol was not enjoyed by anyone in my log cabin. And as for the first two rounds of The Masters, it too, would not experience my longing eyes, desperate for a gander at a sea of pleated golf slacks and pudgy players putting with as much emotion as a box of broken light bulbs. It took eight dusty, crusty guys, four beeping trucks, 147 tear-stained hours and a dozen attempts at rebooting, restarting and rewiring to get us back into the 21st century of Heidi Montag make-overs and Jersey Shore jiz-filled Jacuzzis. Errol and Jesse and Otto (one of the techies and what are the chances of the same name?) and Kelly and Vladimir and Dave and Carl worked day and night, fueled by Monster energy drinks and my homemade, bribe-intended chocolate chip cookies to get our wires uncrossed and back in working order.

When we awoke Saturday morning the web was working, the email was pinging, the phone was ringing, the television was singing, albeit splattered with Tiger and his temptress-laced return to Augusta, and our lives were, again, as fast as they were furious. But as much as I appreciated being back to the future I actually missed living in a Half-Pint world of prairie dresses and pre-Raphaelite playtime. But I won’t tell that to the AT & T customer service manager when I call tomorrow. No, that conversation will be laced with a long list of curdled cultural references and a flurry of four-lettered terms of endearment. Unless, of course I hear things like “free month of service” or “gift card for your trouble.” Then I’ll ask them if they would like either a stick of my homemade butter or a needlepoint pillow sham that says, “Home Is Where The Heart Is.”

Sugar In The New White

When little man Otto was born I kept the white devil away from his lips for the first year. Nothing, and I mean nothing that could possibly be considered a sweetener passed his awesome Mick Jagger lips all those twelve, sleep-deprived months. No, I am not some crunch-a-munch mom who refuses to eat anything that isn’t sprouted and always keeps my leg hairs at a suitable length for French braiding. I am simply stating that while I do not think children should ingest high fructose corn syrup or mounds of C and H sugar cubes I have been known to quietly molest a glazed doughnut like a Catholic cop on a midnight stake out. I may always be just C- list famous for snorting a box of Hot Tamales in the dark recesses of a stinky, overcrowded movie theatre. But sugar makes me feel shitty shitty bang bang after the binge and I have a sneaking suspicion that Otto, king of this candied castle, has inherited my plunging blood sugar and cranky, hungry blues.

Before I became pregnant with Otto I went three years without eating any sugar. My energy level was amazing, my body was in tip top shape and I felt great, albeit the sexually charged reoccurring nightmare involving a vat of Baskin-Robbins mint chocolate chip ice cream, a three-layered, chocolate Devil’s Food cake in the shape of an Armadillo and a semi-tractor trailer filled with cinnamon rolls. But after Otto arrived my milk reserves craved real doughnut kisses and dark chocolate love. When I heard the call of a chocolate shake, Dave hopped to it and provided the mother of his child with a tall cup filled with cold, frothy perfection. I wasn’t eating the bad stuff very often but when mommy wanted some sweet loving from the oven she got it. I began baking again and allowing myself to nibble on Valrhona dark rectangles when the need presented itself. When my car drove passed Bob’s Old Fashioned Donuts it magically stopped and purchased an old fashioned glazed with my name already etched in the glossy outer layer. I will admit that I missed the little bastard and had welcomed him back with sticky, open arms.

Although, sugar was back in my diet I stayed strong when it came to Otto. No sugar, so candy, no cakes and no juice, unless diluted with enough water to make it taste like a faint apple burp. Dave, being of New Jersey stock and non-foody parentage, came into this world with a set of birth rights that included Pop Tart play-dates, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Mondays, Coca-Cola showers and Ring Ding school lunches. And even though Dave had a deep knowledge of the processed world, he seemed to have it out of his system by the time we married and still, would rather cook a meal for ten than be forced to tear open a box and just add water. Lucky me on every level, I know, I know.

But being birthday bananas, I always have a gooey cake for Otto’s birthdays. On his first birthday day, instead of baking it myself, a thought that quickly perished as the guest list ballooned into social obesity, I ordered him a chocolate monster truck cake from a bakery and allowed him to demolish the fist piece as the cameras snapped away. But after the second bite he quickly melted into a terrific tantrum of tears while we all applauded at the candle blowing, collectively scaring the shit out of him. Seeing that the singing came way past his nap time and from his angle, all he must have seen was a large group of unfamiliar, hipster giants standing around him whooping out of tune, it really is no wonder he fell apart into a paper plate of high fructose corn syrupy badness.

Another year and then another went by without a lot of sugar going into his peachy pie hole. Occasionally, he would get a cookie or some cake at a party and sometimes, a scoop of ice cream on a really hot day. But I never gave him the hard stuff, the stuff that addicts sell plasma for, the stuff that wars have been waged in the name of, and the good old-fashioned dime store candy. I knew the candy car would drive up soon enough. Why speed up the inevitable race? I wanted to prolong the stage of Otto, my healthy, broccoli-loving bad boy, thinking green vegetables were a treat and candy was crap. Otto hadn’t really experienced the true rush of the satisfying sugar spins until yesterday, a day that will forever be noted as the day the cavity came to town.

My dearest friend GG is an Easter whore, right down to the bunny ears and high-heeled helium balloons. She hosts an annual, all-out, over-the-top Easter egg hunt at her in-laws amazing manse in the Hills of Bel Air. All the kids are required to wear pastel while the doting parents have to come swathed in head-to-toe white. It is beautiful, magical and profoundly Protestant. Eggs are hidden all over the grounds and after the group photo is taken all the kiddies run like little tiny Lindsay Lohans being chased by a feral band of bloated paparazzi toward conspicuously hidden eggs Easter wishes and candy-coated dreams.

So yesterday, dressed like a super plus tampon tied to a Crayola Crayon I held tight to Otto’s hand as we both ran into a beautiful English garden sprinkled with plastic eggs that were filled with treats. To give Otto an upper hand and the competitive edge needed to be a winner, I pointed to hidden eggs in the lettuce plants and the tomato patch and the zucchini flowers and fennel bulbs and he scooped them up and threw them in his basket with the skill and focus of a tiny, terrifying Michael Jordan. Children squawked and squealed and dove into the dirt in their Brookes Brothers best looking for treats and treasures and ultimately, the golden egg that garnered the big prize. It was pint-sized pandemonium and Otto loved every minute of it.

When we reached the tennis court and all the eggs were spoken for, Otto dug into his basket and began a slow jog into a whole new world. He popped open the first egg he could reach and poured the entire contents of jellybeans into his teeny, unpolluted mouth. By the time I noticed what was happening he stood stone still, half chewing and half sucking on a wad of orange sugar that resembled a small, deformed, translucent

tangerine. I explained to him calmly that what he had so skillfully shoved in his mouth would be all the candy he would get for the rest of the morning. I begged him to chew slowly and not to inhale his newfound friend, The Jellybean Giant. He looked at me as though I were Nurse Ratched, wiped a river of Orange colored drool from his mouth with his shirt sleeve and pleaded with me, “Just one more, Mommy?” I steadfastly said no and looked down thinking that he indeed, just then, reminded me of Blaire’s cousin Geri from The Facts Of Life.

After he finally swallowed the wicked wad, we played a little basketball and hung out with some friends on the court. As I swished a few three pointers wearing flats and a blanket of pathetic basketball memories, he covertly picked up dozens of jellybeans that other children had spilled all over the tennis court and shoved them in his mouth. I finally caught on after he refused to participate in a game of one-on-one and suspiciously sat under a tree staring at the service line. I walked over and pried open his mouth, finding gobs of multicolored Jelly Bellies stuck between his once virginal teeth.

The rest of the day consisted of small, one-sided arguments as to why he could not eat EVERYTHING in the new Easter basket, why he couldn’t sleep with his new Pez dispenser, who was Pez and what did he taste like, the lack of excitement in a healthy lunch, an Academy Award winning performance of refusing to eat said lunch and the shear stupidity of napping on God’s day of chocolate bunny madness.

Easter has come and gone and while it was wonderful in all its bunny brutalizing and egg hunting extravagance, it has ushered in a new era here at Casa de Cohen. I would now like to introduce to you, Otto, the sugar fiend. I knew the slope was slippery but I had no idea it was so sticky with hot fudge feistiness and caramel-coated cockiness. If he actually naps today, after his twenty-four hour Olympic-sized come down, I think I may bake some cookies and then stick my head into the preheated oven.

Midnight Train To Georgia

Today was not only a much needed birthday lunch get-together for my group of gals but a sumptuous slice of cake. The first beautiful bite was finding a perfect parking space one block from the restaurant that used to be my twice-weekly pit stop of leisurely lunching and is now a barely bi-annual drive by where I can spare an hour and guiltily graze like a Holstein cow at a Hawaiian Luau.

The next chunk of the death by chocolate butter cream was getting to go away for a few hours and reliving my younger years eating butter-drizzled croissants, discussing the latest fashion stylings of the youthful drug-riddled jet set of Hollywood and feeling as young as I did when tequila was one of my BFFs and my body hadn’t been mutilated by childbirth and sleeplessness.

Then, I assaulted the next layer of fluffy gooey goodness with a scrumptious and satisfying star sighting of Elizabeth Berkeley (Saved By The Bell and Show Girls!) sitting at a small table to my left while on her laptop writing a script. And as if on cue, Minnie Driver arrived moments later carrying a fringed Bottegea Veneta handbag that looked like what the vagina of a Snuffleupagus might look like if, indeed, the hairy, child-friendly beast was a lady monster. Add to that bite of brilliance the fact that Minnie then air kissed Elizabeth’s newly built face with a half-hearted, accented double cheeked European number and walked away with her orange Pashmina swaying in the brutal breeze of unemployment. I truly thought that that was the last possible dab of delicious I could possibly consume.

But then once again, I picked up my friendly utensil in crime, scraped a layer of the chocolate Ganache frosting off the top of this magnificent afternoon and really got to see a group of great girls sitting around catching up about the lives that we drive in the fast lane and the kids that fill us with unleaded joy. We ate at a snail’s pace without a sippy-cup to fill or a boob to whip out, save for one mom with a super easy baby who is just not hard to look at or to squeeze.

And just when I thought the yummy crumbs that I so unattractively licked up would make my stomach bust out of my low-waist Levi Skimmers, a pair of trendy jeans that I paid a small fortune for, so as to feel more relevant and alive as I inch toward middle age, I realized that the best part of the cake was across the table on someone else’s plate. The cherry on top, the icing as it were, the sweetest bite of this layered lusciousness was the birthday girl herself. There, in a gaggle of collected craziness, we sat celebrating the first day of the fortieth year of a divinely, delicious peach named Georgia. She was ripe with relaxation, leaking with new motherhood (literally covered in breast milk from a pump and drive debacle) hilarious in her self-deprecation and positively beaming with buoyancy and beauty. She was my GG, the girl I fell in love with all those years ago, the girl I laughed with, cried with and above all, fought for.

The last morsel that I thought I could possibly shove into my greedy pie hole was the feeling that she left me with today, the feeling of overwhelming love, accomplishment, understanding and survival. We had made it through, she and I, and were both better off for it. And after all the goodbyes and last minutes anecdotes of our sanity-chasing sewing circle we walked down the street together as if no time had past since our first date at the same celebrity-littered French patisserie all those springs before. As we stood on the street corner snapping the last of the photos to document the inevitably cruel crawl toward an AARP gold card membership, we laughed just as hard as we had during those lazy, Malibu summers and childless, ladies lunches so long ago, smiling as if no cares could ever sit atop our older shoulders.

As I hugged her goodbye, feeling filled to my brim with tasty terrific-ness, she pulled away and threw a handful of Valrhona chocolate sprinkles all over my day, gilding the lily with loveliness. With an infectious smile and the sincerity of an Ivy League valedictorian on graduation day, she told me how awesomely hot and skinny I looked in my denial denims I so desperately donned. It may have been her birthday but I got the best slice of birthday cake, frosting flowers and all.

I heart you, GG.