We're Just That Chic

Yesterday the Pink Torpedoes--my best high school friends (except for Anne, who is busy being brainy in California)--gathered for dinner and drinks at a restaurant we've been dying to go to for a year. We sat in front of the restaurant's two-story windows and when the waitress asked if we wanted to see the martini menu, we said, "Yes! Yes! Yes!"

She smiled at us. "Did you guys just come from seeing Sex and the City?" she asked.

We looked around the table. We were confused. What about us seemed like we'd just come from the Sex and the City movie?

We told the waitress no. Becky and Amy and Steph said they'd just gotten off work. I'd just come from an afternoon of chocolate chip pancake-eating at the diner where the Boy From Work and I used to wait on farmers and their mustached wives.

"Oh," the waitress said. "It's just that you guys are dressed so cute, and now you're here to drink martinis. We had a lot of that kind of thing--girls getting all dressed up and going to see the movie down the street, then coming here for Cosmos--when the movie came out. I figured maybe you were doing the same."

"No," we said, "this is just us."

Most of us had already seen the Sex and the City movie. Amy and I went the last time I was home. In fact--and I am not even remotely ashamed to admit this--I bought advanced tickets so we could attend opening night. And while I did slip into a pair of purple satin pumps, I did not do myself up like most of the other women at the packed movie theater. Many came dressed in gowns and wacky dresses, in stilettos and giant costume jewelry. It was quite the experience. Everyone was so into it. People yelled and gasped and talked at the screen like they were talking to real friends. "Oh no, Carrie!" some of the girls shrieked when she was having another disaster with Big. "What the hell are you WEARING?!" others yelled when Miranda or Carrie strutted onto a street wearing something truly hideous. And during the wretched heartbreaking Big moments, the whole theater was damp with tears. I had never heard so many women sobbing at once. It was the most interesting experience I ever had in a movie theater.

But to be compared to the girls who went all out for a night out on the town with their best television girlfriends didn't really offend us. In fact, we thought it was cute that we were confused for girls who'd glammed up to go see the Sex and the City girls when we were actually just glammed up for the sake of four hours of martinis and giggling about people we went to high school with. We're just that habitually silly, that habitually chic.