Sisters of Perpetual Disorder

The Sisters of Perpetual Disorder met Saturday night at Uncannery Row. This group of middle-aged women gathers semi-monthly (or as often as we can pull it off), rotating to each others’ homes, for themed potluck dinners. We eat, laugh, gossip, exchange stories about our lives, polish off a few bottles of wine, slug down after-dinner coffee, divvy up the leftovers into yogurt containers, and go home stuffed & contented. Since Mom and I had recently returned from our trek across the Yucatan, the theme this month was Mexican.

Ray worked like a dog helping me clean house in preparation for the dinner. When I brought the card table up from the basement, he suggested I seat several women at the old formica diner table down in the greenhouse, and the rest in the dining room. I explained that women like to be all in one bunch where they can talk over & around each other, finish each others’ sentences, embellish each others’ stories, and bust out all together in infectious laughter. This seems to me in contrast to a group of men, who speak in fits & starts (note to self: add “fits & starts” to Grandma’s list of extinct expressions), take polite turns speaking, and leave pregnant (harhar) pauses between speakers.

When the guests arrived, Ray retreated to his anti-estrogen fortress, his upstairs music room, and spent the evening working on CD’s—he’s transferring an enormous, lifelong collection of vinyl to CD then to iPod—appearing only occasionally to fill a plate.

Typically, women start showing up for Sisters’ dinners around 5, and it can take an hour or more for all of us to straggle in. Then there’s often cooling, carving, re-heating or finish-baking to do while we greet, catch up, and sip apertifs. When all the potluck dishes are finally spread out on kitchen counters, they represent the most amazing labor of love and an unbelievable work of art. In this case, “Still Life with Sombrero.”

Themes are loosely interpreted, and the menu is always as eclectic as the group of women themselves. This month’s dinner included two kinds of enchiladas, posole (a wonderfully spicy pork soup), tacos al pastor (pork & pineapple tacos), quesadillas, salsa ribs, fresh mozzarella with tomatoes, basil & olive oil, sopapilla cheesecake, key lime pie, cherry popsicles, and after-dinner sips, “para digestión,” of xtabentun (anise/honey liqueur we brought back from Mexico) and licor de cacao (also lugged back from Mexico—you can’t have a women’s dinner without some sort of chocolate).

As usual, the dinner conversation was a rambling patchwork of relationships, travel, surgeries, kids, and Bohunk grandmas who swore like sailors (September’s dinner theme will be Czech/Serbian). But what I love most about the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder dinners is that for a while, disorder is okay. The dinners are a blessed break from trying to juggle & closely manage (as women are wont to do) work, family, global issues, retirement planning, and the particular menopausal mêlée of forgetfulness, hot flashes, night sweats, sags, bags, wrinkies, and midriff poundage. For a while at least, we can all let our thinning hair down and do the things women our age love to do best: enjoy each others’ company and eat.