Happy Birthday, Lady!

Wow, so it's really been a month since I posted last? I need to start making more interesting things happen to me, or else make the things that happen to me sound blog worthy.

But enough about me and my uninspiring life. Today is my BFF Lady's birthday, and I think it's only fitting that I take a moment to honor her.

Lady and I have known each other since tenth grade, and we kept in touch after high school, but we didn't really become close until the summer after my third year at college. I say "my third year" and not "my junior year" because it took me six years to graduate college. Shut up.

That summer, I'd moved back home with my parents and my second night there I was already going stir crazy. So I looked up old friends and Lady happened to be available. We went to the Strawberry Festival, and fate took its course.

She ended up getting me a job where she worked, and staged a fake engagement for me at the end of the summer when it was time for me to go back to school. Literally. I'd been hired under the assumption that I would be long-term, and since I needed the job, neither of us spoke up that I'd only be there for about two months. So when August came, she invented a fake boyfriend for me (Marco?), helped me pick out a fake ring from Walmart, and even sent me roses to work the day I announced that I would be moving to Arizona to join my rich fiance.

Yes, I'm serious. And everyone totally bought it.

But one of my favorite memories of Lady is our road trip to Memphis in August 2006. She wasn't even an Elvis fan, but she was up for anything, so we drove like a million hours from Philadelphia to Memphis to attend the official Elvis week festivities. It was hands down the best vacation of my life, and mostly because of Lady. Ok, it was like 50% Elvis, 50% Lady.

We made so many memories that week, and our stories have never ceased to make me laugh. The one I love to tell the most is how on the drive down there, we decided to use fake names for the whole time we were in Memphis. We spent hours, literally hours picking out names. Lady wanted her first name to be James, and we concluded that a female with a masculine name like 'James' definitely needed an extremely feminine last name to balance it out.

Once we reached that consensus, we spent a few minutes bouncing ideas off each other. Flowers? Cloud? No, no no. There was a pregnant pause as we both considered feminine options. And that's when Lady said the two phrases that still, to this day, make me pee a little.

Lady: James Fallopian Tube? James NuvaRing?

In the end, she went with Vader. James Vader. And spent the entire week correcting drunk hicks who kept asking, "James Spader? Like James Spader the actor?"

And every now and again, I get a text from Lady that says, "James NuvaRing".

And that is why I love her.

Happy Birthday, Lady! I wish I could be there to see you in all your mink-wrapped, leopard-skin gloved glory.