It was a last minute thing really… I was swamped with deadlines, but it was Friday and friends asked us if we wanted to come join them this weekend down at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. As always my girlfriend is up for a weekend away from the grind and she knew I’d need R&R so she talked me into it. What she hadn’t told me was that it was Women’s Weekend.

…

Here’s the schedule for the wild women’s weekend:

10PM: Arrive at friends house. Roll around with friends’ cafe latte standard poodle.

10PM-11:30PM: Drink margaritas and the four of us bitch about how hard we work and how tired we are and point at parts of our body that hurt. (We do not expose those parts to each other…not that many margaritas)

11:30PM: Bedtime.

SATURDAY

8:30AM: Wakeup. Begin to drink 3 pot of coffee. The girls love their coffee just as much as I do.

8:30AM-6:30PM: We all sat around in our pajamas napping, drinking, drinking Bloody Marys, eating brunch, watching the Masters, reading, then drinking Margaritas, talking about how we should be out because it’s Women’s Weekend, then I would love on the poodle.

6:30PM: Someone got in the shower…then someone else did…well, looks like we’re going out after all.

…

Destination The Frogg Pond. Now this isn’t your usual lesbian bar. It is, in my humble opinion, Lesbian Nirvana. In one pretty small space, with a restaurant adjacent, you have black, white, yellow, brown, old, young, butch, fem, and everything in between. All with no attitude. You brush by to get a drink, and it’s “no problem dear” with a hand on the shoulder or hip or maybe somewhere else, depending on how late you stay…Live music sometimes. DJ sometimes. Dancing where ever anyone feels the spirit hits them. Very laid back. Very beach. Very fun. So this is where we go…for more drinks. If anyone’s been counting, your hostess has been drinking all day-now I like my drinks-but I’m not the wild the wild college chippie anymore. I just like to smooth out the edges, but here I am in Lesbian Nirvana drinking the nectar of Aztec Gods.

We find a spot in the corner between one TV showing the Red Sox beating the Yankees (always good ’cause I have an ex from New York) and The Lord’s Boot Camp on CBS. A first for me in all the gay bars I’ve been to…maybe they just forgot to change the channel once lesbian rugby was over or something) when all of sudden these two black women that totally look like the Weather Girls break out into song. A third girl pitches over like she’s gonna throw up, but she’s just dumped out her giant purse. Giant purse??? Some of these ladies are straight…Wow this is a cool bar!

Oh, by the way…I’m still sing Jose Cuervo’s praises the whole time. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen my spirit animal and am having a really good conversation with it by now. Meanwhile the other group…Weather Girls and Purse Girls are having a good time also. There’s like 8 or 10 of them and we 4 happen to be right next to them at the bar. How the Universe does set things up…maybe it’s drinking as much as we are…well it seems that they’re celebrating birthdays. Birthday cake comes from somewhere and begins to go around the place. Well…congratulations!!! all the lesbians that have been listening to the Weather girls sing and Purse Girls pick up mints and who know what out of those big purses start buying shots for the group. Friendly bunch those “Beach Women”. It’s starting to get pretty rowdy…Women’s weekend has officially started for us. And then she walks in…the doppelganger-not mine, thank goodness. I’ve read enough Sci-Fi to know that the Universe splits open then-but a doppelganger none the less.

…

This tall black woman with short cropped hair, crisp oxford shirt, black pants, belt and shoes comes strolling through the bar. Ladies and gentlemen…meet my old friend Kat’s twin from another universe. She walks right up to the Weather Purse Birthday Party and pulls out her wallet. Out come the bills. One, two, three, four…to pay for whatever the girls have been ordering or breaking or both. Me?…I’m just staring at this woman thinking that she’s a double for Kat. I swing around and start this feverish tequila talk about her to my friends. My girlfriend smiles. she’s already heard all the Dallas stories. We all look aback and stare at the doppelganger. As is usual in these situations, this woman starts to realize we’re all staring at her. One of my friends thinks fast and saves us all. “My friend here has been telling us that you remind her of a good friend she has in Dallas.” “Dallas?” the woman says…”You live in Dallas?” “I used to,” I stamper. “I’m a huge Cowboy’s fan!” Well that was it…the connection…and a football one at that. How many Cowboys fans do you find up here. I start telling her about Kat and Dallas…introductions all around.

The 4 of us to the Weather Purse Birthday Party. The group is huge now…doppelganger-Kat and I have seated ourselves at the bar and are talking about who knows what and the Weather Purse Birthday Party is beginning to dance with anyone in the bar. The birthday girls are still doing shots…I think…or is it the purse girls now…I start asking Kat who all her friends are. Turns out she works with them all. One of the weather girls is her girlfriend. She starts pointing at a girl dancing with another girl…”that woman there…she’s my girlfriends sister. She’s always been curious, but she’s straight”. Then we both looked at her dancing with the stranger from the bar and laughed. A lot of lines were getting blurred by that point. Doppelganger-Kat had invited the 4 of us to some formal event she goes to in Philly every November and I was super happy because someone pinched my ass and my girlfriend was nowhere in the vicinity.

…

But there’s a problem…all that tequila and talk of Dallas has made me homesick and unstable on my feet, but my 3 amigas know the cure…Mexican food. “Come on…it’s time to vamanos.” By now I’m speaking high school Spanish and remembering the Alamo…it might be past “tiempo a vamanos”. One on each side and one behind I have a lesbian escort to Mariachi-Fine Spanish and Mexican Cuisine. Right now some of you might be thinking-Hey!, why didn’t your friends say “haven’t you had enough to drink hostess?”

Well, #1. I’m an adult, and usually I can act like one. #2 The “S” middle initial does sometimes stand for “stubborn”. And #3. Sometimes you have that perfect storm of crazy week of deadlines, tequila, and a doppelganger.

So we order a huge amount of food at this restaurant, and by the grace of any deity you pray to I drank “agua”. I think that might be why I woke up the next morning feeling tired but on the whole OK. I even took a walk along the beach with my girlfriend that morning. Later on, the 4 of us made it into town. There was no sun to enjoy, but we managed to buy books and gifts and stuff for the pets, then I noticed we were all moving on the slow side of normal. I smiled a sly smile at my friend and she grinned and said loud enough for us all to hear…”you know…sometimes you just have to blow the stink off.” And that was it…we all packed up and drove home. Ready to be cogs in the corporate wheel early Monday morning. So I don’t think I need a moral or even a good ending for this one…I think my friend took care of it for me…

“Sometimes you just have to blow the stink off.”