The Birth of Lucy and Ethel Day

Since children (4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son for me, 2-year-old daughter for her), it’s been hard for my best bud from college (H.) and I to get together for more than an hour every couple of months. Recently, it occurred to me that in addition to e-mail and the four times a year when we can actually catch sight of one another, we should have one day a year (two if we can swing it) when we get to be the friends that we were when we met in college. We get to try something new, chat over coffee, share music and ideas, and mostly, laugh — laugh at ourselves, laugh at life. In our senior year of college, we had many adventures living with two other roommates in a farmhouse. I think that was the year when we started having Lucy and Ethel moments that we described as such: Lucy and Ethel paint the exterior trim, Lucy and Ethel go to the beach in February (in a snowstorm), Lucy and Ethel put up a Christmas tree. Lucy and Ethel get stuck in the farmhouse in another snowstorm and mix too many alcoholic beverages. You get the idea.  That’s when it came to me that we needed a Lucy and Ethel Day, and it should happen one weekday during the last week of February (because everyone knows that February really is the longest month to endure — just ask Dar Williams). Here is how this idea started in my mind.

In the course of going through our attic for yard sale purposes, I came across my two College sweatshirts (both purchased while I was in high school and had chosen but did not yet attend the College). I don’t think I’m going to wear them anymore, but I don’t want to throw them away. So I had the bright idea that I could cut out the fronts of the sweatshirts, in a square, and turn the sweatshirts into a pillow. This pillow would work in my son’s room. He just got his big boy bed and the cover is all balls and sports. That way, I would get to keep the pillow but not actually keep it in my bedroom because, well, do I really have to explain? I didn’t even get as far as pulling out the scissors when I remembered that I cannot sew. This did not stop me from continuing the creative process, though. I thought that the square College emblems would not really be big enough for a pillow, so I should get some red sweatshirt material to use as a border to sort of frame it. Again, the realization that I cannot sew. Then I thought, “H. sews things. She has made curtains and purses and the like. Maybe she can help me.” Then I remembered her blog about making the crib skirt. And I imagined us bent over the sewing machine in her living room, with some sort of alcoholic beverage, laughing. And I realized that this would probably take more than our hour-long quarterly visit to accomplish. And I thought about how this seemed like a Lucy and Ethel moment. And that’s when I decided that we should have a whole Lucy and Ethyl Day.

Once a year, at the end of February so that we have something to look forward to during the awful beginning of February and so that we can make it to March, we should get together (on a weekday, so that we already have childcare in place and it doesn’t really disturb our families), starting fairly early in the morning, and have coffee. Lots of coffee. And maybe smoothies and later on some coffeecake or something similarly decadent. During the coffee, we could listen to music and actually talk and laugh, much like we used to do, oh, almost every weekend morning when we were in college. The Lucy and Ethel portion of the day means that we must either make something or do something we have never done, or go somewhere we have never gone (something that can be accomplished easily in part of one day). For example, we could make pillows (not something she hasn’t done, despite the crib skirt incident, but something I haven’t done successfully since the seventh grade). Or we could make homemade pizza with homemade dough. Or we could make foccaccia from scratch. Or make “Vision Boards” of what we imagine our lives can be. Or we could go somewhere in an hour radius that we haven’t been before (Lucy and Ethel love roadtrips).

Lucy and Ethel Day is about friendship, but it is also about the creative beings that we were when our friendship started. I want to remind that girl inside me that she still gets a voice, a chance to laugh and make something that doesn’t turn out perfectly. Too often she ends up waiting patiently for the adult me to get the kids to bed, make lists, make a presentation for work, sweep the floors, and go to C*stco for milk. So, this day is about that girl, too — the girl who went to London for a semester without really knowing what she signed up for, the girl who wrote damn good essays, the girl who took the first dance class of her life as a college senior (Modern Dance — one of these days I’ll write about how that was the most valuable class I took in college). That girl deserves a day to play. If the end of February doesn’t work out one year, we can have a Lucy and Ethel Day in the summer. There is a whole different set of possibilities then.