Eggs Bechdel
We are the ladies who brunch. Hear us roar!
Our wheelchairs will be rhinestoned and painted with flames, our IV bags will be filled with mimosas, and we will faithfully check each other’s dentures for smears of red lipstick — we have promised. We are going to grow old together. We’re the ladies of ladies’ brunch. We’re in our twenties, our thirties, and our forties. Best friends and acquaintances; white collar professionals and artisans; married, single, and in between. We gather once a month on the Lower East Side to wear hats, have drinks, and laugh.
This is where the Bechdel Test is won. The test was born in 1985, when cartoonist Allison Bechdel had one of the characters in her Dykes to Watch Out For strip outline her movie criteria: “One, it has to have at least two women in it, who two talk to each other, about three something besides a man.” Most movies fail the test, but that’s because filmmakers haven’t figured out the secret to a perfect score: ladies’ brunch pretty much kicks its ass.
Not that our Sundays, are a tie-dyed Lilith Fair healing circle, either; we’re far too punk for that. It’s just that we’ve created our own Amazonian island — women who opted out of what we were supposed to do a long time ago and fought our way up to the front of the stage by the speakers to feel the full force of it all. We’re older now, somewhat more settled-down and stylish, but we still seek out the noisy, rollicking anthem of rebellion in each other. In this world, men are excluded, but not unloved; they are simply not the point.
Furthermore, we are certainly not there to figure if we’re a “Samantha” or a “Carrie” — although if “Sex and the City” got anything right about New York and the modern condition of womanhood, it’s that the network of female friends and ready access to egg dishes are central to our well-being. Apart from that bit of wisdom, the show is never discussed — none of us are in here to discuss the advantages of finding a man to pay for overpriced shoes or complete our lives.We are their for our own reasons. Maybe it’s the fact that we pay outrageous rents and work incredible hours just to stay afloat that draws us together; maybe it’s the gradual decline of the American family, or global warming. I don’t really care. All I know is that the second my salty, cheap-vodka-infused Bloody Mary hits the table and I lift it and send up the war cry “To ladies’ brunch,” I get the sense that I am at home with my family.
“To ladies’ brunch!” the assembled congregation responds.
–
As much as I was born to be a square peg, I never planned to be chronically single and childless at 41. But that’s how it turned out. I’m not against the idea of meeting a man and falling in love and binge watching Netflix together — I welcome it. I’m just not pouring all my energy into it. And I’m not some cliched, busy rom-com career gal who forgot to fall in love; for one thing, if I were, I’d have a lot more money. It’s just that fate didn’t drop Prince Charming into my path, and after a certain amount of waiting for him, I took my life off pause and kept it moving.
Thus far it’s worked out pretty well, but I still have a lot of unpunched spaces on the society loyalty card, the theoretical one we’re handed at birth featuring everything we’re supposed to accomplish before we die (check off “marry,” “buy a home,” and “have kids” and get one free regular-size frozen yogurt!). For my thirtieth birthday my best friend from high school, Abby, gave me a kitchen knife, reasoning that I liked to cook. We drank banana daiquiris and caught up on where we were in life. I was trying to start a makeup company and going to a lot of rockabilly shows and therapy sessions still trying to assemble the jumbled psychic kit I came with. She and her husband had just bought a place in Connecticut and had been trying “forever” to get pregnant. They had been married less than two years. As we chatted I noticed that the knife was still wrapped in its signature Bed, Bath and Beyond bridal registry paper. For a moment I pondered whether this was just a clumsy regift or a subtle signal that I should plunge it into my cold, loveless spinster heart.
For my fortieth birthday Emma, our beloved grand dame of ladies’ brunch, gave me a knit purse in the shape of a dachshund. I love it; he sleeps on my bed like a teddy bear. She knows I love dogs and accessories and I get happy every time I look at his little stitched face. It’s like I am being supported in my long-term goal of becoming a crazy dog lady. “You do you,” he says with his little yarn smile, “I don’t care if you went to your brother’s wedding stag; there’s no judgement in my little button eyes.” To be seen for who you are and welcomed to the table with a hearty “gooba gabba, we welcome you, one of us” is the human heart in microcosm.
–One of my favorite things about ladies’ brunch is being seated at our table. It’s part fashion show, part parade thrown for my friends. The simple act of moving a dozen or so women across a room to their reserved table is met with the stares and comments. I favor faux fur stoles and turbans and mounds of bracelets, like some latter-day, post-punk Norma Desmond. A young man in khakis once asked, “why are you so dressed up?”
“Why aren’t you?” I countered.
Some observers have asked if this is a costume party. It isn’t. The peplums and hats and hairdos aren’t my costumes; they are fundamentally who I am. The quiet career separates of office jobs and yoga pants for the gym were more of an artifice for me. To be dressed up on a Sunday and out in girl gang of rock ‘n’ roll fashionistas is who I really am. I’m sure to the outside world we look like the world’s oldest juvenile delinquents, but it’s more that we’re the square pegs of the corporate world. Between the tattoos, the piercings and the myriad hair colors, you’d be surprised to find out what productive citizens we are. My friend Emma characterizes the event as “A lawyer, somedesigners, a nurse, two editors and a couple of copywriters walk into a bar…” Hilarity ensues.
We are here to praise each other and test the patience of waitresses and the house policy of free refills. It’s not the we don’t talk about men, it’s that we’re not really there to hash out relationship woes. No one tries to set me up or assure me I’m fine, even if I haven’t caught THE ONE yet. I’m fine because I am am fine and friendly and me and that is enough. Of course, we talk about our lives, so our relationships come up, but almost it’s universally in some laughable, mutated form. Like the time my friend Meirav insisted that she didn’t want her husbands’ hypothetical future ashes pressed into a diamond (which is an option for loved ones, apparently), despite our insistence it was both the most goth and fashionable course of action for the modern widow. In our thirties, this is funny, but I’m sure if many, many years from now, we need to discuss our mortality in earnest we will gather over brunch and dry each others’ tears and have a good laugh. I envision a “Golden Girls” future for us.
Recently, on a field trip with some of the other girls to a millinery class, Christine — my best friend of the last 14 or so years— and I spotted two of the women regularly pictured on one of our favorite blogs. “Advanced Style” is a fashion photography blog dedicated to women of a certain age with a flair for dramatic dressing. We watched them from afar like they were unapproachable rock stars, clad in innumerable accessories and angular hats. As they laughed and chatted and hot-glued buckram fascinators together, they seemed so genuinely happy in each other’s company. To my eyes, it was like they had reached another level of enlightenment — one that’s free of age-appropriate trends, Coco Chanel’s oppressive rules of tasteful dress, and the weight of the expectations of youth.
“Look,” I said, “it’s our future. Let’s get started now.”
