Sisters of Perpetual Disorder

I attended the June meeting of the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder last night. These are monthly (mostly) gatherings of midlife women (including two mother/daughter sets last night!). We rotate to a different member’s house each time (so no one will have to clean two months in a row), and we have a loosely-themed potluck dinner, drink a few bottles of wine, chat, laugh a LOT, drink a couple pots of coffee, divvy up the leftovers in recycled yogurt containers, and adjourn.

At last night’s meeting, we were joined at the table by our constant midlife companions, Nostalgia and Confession. But these are not the sappy, sentimental pals one might expect, because one of the best things about middle-aged women is that if you get a bunch of them together, all pretense of propriety and dignity (at least in terms of storytelling), goes out the window.

For example, there’s one well-traveled woman’s story of two ex-lovers—one with whom she’d dallied in the Midwest, one with whom she’d cavorted in South America—and how the two men happened to meet at a base camp in the Himalayas and, over dinner later, discovered they had HER in common. Take that, Kevin Bacon.

Or another woman’s story of drinking too many dirty martinis at a wedding reception because Jennifer Aniston said they were her favorite drink, so she wanted to try them for herself. A few tries later, she missed her chair to find herself on the floor, carried on conversations she only knew of from reports she got much later, and eventually snuck off to the kitchen to beg a lobster from the chef. She packed the lobster in her suitcase among her clothes, and the next morning, she and her crustacean leftovers flew home.

Or another woman’s story of digging her scrapbook out of a box one day to discover that she’d been to a Grateful Dead concert in the 1970’s. There were hand-written comments in the margins of the scrapbook next to the ticket stub—who she’d gone with, what she thought of the opening band, how the Dead boys sounded, etc.—and she recognized the handwriting as her own. She was both thrilled to know she’d seen the Dead play live, and utterly disappointed to have no memory whatsoever of having been at the concert.

Or another woman’s stories about dating a cockeyed Missouri hillbilly guitar player until she took up with the Irish bartender. No kidding.

Or another woman’s story about waitressing in the 1970’s. She’d stopped to pick up glasses from a booth table and found the occupants of the booth had not, in fact, left the building. They were under the table, on the floor, naked, engaged in boisterous carnal “discovery.” Talk about last call.

Young people, if they could listen at the keyholes, would be shocked & horrified to learn that these delightful, sensible and wise, gracefully aging women were once (and still are occasionally) wild young people, too.