austin weekend

For the last 3 years, my friends from college and I have been making a concerted effort to go away together for a weekend.  There are 14 women in this group and we affectionately refer to each other as “the homies.”  This year, about half of the women will be 50 and next year the other half.  Amongst our group, we have kids who are in elementary school and who are off at college. We have known each other for over 30 years and each year our love, appreciation and admiration for each person’s individual strengths and weaknesses increases.

This year we traveled to Austin, Texas.  The location was a great midpoint as we live on both ends of the country.  We secured a great AirBnB that had beds for all of us and plenty of hairdryers. We were there the last weekend in September and the weather was hot and sticky. The itinerary was complete with bars, restaurants and tons of time for conversation.

The best part of these getaways are the individual and group discussions.  In order of most humorous, we discussed:

• Who is having sex with their husbands and liking it, who is not having sex with their husbands and who is using alternative methods to find sexual satisfaction?
• Are you actually crazy or just having menopause symptoms?
• Hair color, laser treatments, fillers, Botox and plastic surgery – who has had what and what are our plans for the next 10 years?
• Which ailments are the most pressing for each of us, such as not sleeping, sweating, muscle or joint pain, digestion, or being overweight?
• Who we should have dated or not dated in college and what happened to those guys?

“Waist-Up Lesbian”

Without a doubt, the highlight of the trip was a conversation on the first night at dinner.  Our friend Addy is an amazing storyteller who patiently chooses her words, uses the right amount of swearing and spares no detail.  She is not one to hide her thoughts or feelings and tends to lay everything out on the table (which I absolutely love.)  From her end seat on our long rectangular table, she announced, “I’d like to be a waist up lesbian!” And, as she said this, she put her hand at her waist, palms up and lifted them towards her shoulders – to visually demonstrate the concept of “waist up.”

Addy explained that she feels like her life would be a lot easier if she were living with a woman instead of a man.  She’s not typically attracted to women, but she can envision a scenario where living with a woman and feeling warmly towards her would be less complicated than living and negotiating with a man (most likely due to the Testosterone). I understand her line of thinking completely.  I spent a week with my female cousin this summer and it was household bliss as we seamlessly shared the cooking, cleaning, and social planning and were completely in sync on our binge watching.

For certain, Addy’s husband, who is very attractive, younger man, would not love this idea. However, I refuse to let that impinge on the hilariousness of her pronouncement.  As Addy went on to explain, the idea is genius because everything above the waist is “easy to deal with.”  She isn’t interested in another woman’s “undercarriage” – a term we borrowed from Melissa McCarthy’s character in the movie “Bridesmaids.” So, if she could keep the physical acts above the waist, which would include touching, embracing and kissing, then a “waist-up lesbian” relationship would be an ideal option for her.

The rest of us were blown away by this new concept. First, this idea fits in with our “Golden Girls” fantasy where live out our retirement years on an all-female compound.  Second, it was just hysterically funny and typical of Addy to throw out something so crazy yet completely logical.  And, we love her for this.  She might be somewhat serious, she might not be, but she put it out there and let us enjoy it. I can’t wait until next fall to get an update and see whether she started “workshopping” this idea.