May 19, 2012

Best friends forever BFF

All these years, and that's a lot of then, I thought BFF mean best female friend. My BFF corrected me last week when she cane to Isla Mujeres for five days. Best friends forever, now 35 years since we were roommates  in  Columbus, Ohio, in our early 20s. We used to joke then that we were one Eastern European heritage person named Zina Pacyna, munching sauerkraut and potatoes. Deb worked as a reporter and newscaster for WTVN radio while I did the same for WCOL.
 The day I moved into her apartment in the first ring suburb of Grandview  (We were Grandview Girls before the song!) one of my cats went into her bedroom and took a dump on her pillow. Yikes! Later, one of use was boiling eggs while  talking on the phone.  The water boiled out and the eggs exploded all over the kitchen. We were leaning up pieces of them a year later from a curio shelf and behind the stove.
 I was there when she started dating her husband Tom Cooper  and when they married in Pittsburgh's North Hills. After a stint at Dayton's WOIO-TV statehouse news bureau. she moved to take a job at Channel 11 in Pittsburgh to take care of her mother who had cancer. We were costume masters during Halloween in both Columbus and Pittsburgh. My favorite was when Tom, a detective,  borrowed a street snitch's pimp suit and Deb and I went to Goodwill for skirts that were too tight, too short - perfect! and went as his girls. The look on the wine store clerk's face was priceless as we entered to buy a bottle to take to an OSU criminology professor's party. We looked good!

 I landed  at WTOV-TV (Steubenville-Wheeling), so we'd see each other in Pittsburgh on weekends or at my mom's place at Lake Mohawk in East Central Ohio.
 When I was working at Cleveland  Public Radio, she and Tom stopped for a couple nights in my Lakewood apartment, on their way to Sacramento, where Deb had taken a job as a Statehouse reporter and anchor and Tom continued to study criminology  waiting out  the residence requirement to become the oldest rookie in Sacramento's history.
 Before I started my job at The Plain Dealer, I took a cross country train trip that included visiting Deb and Tom when baby bump Kenny was about to break out. She, as big as a house, met me at the Sacramento train station. We went to shower parties and swimming, hoping Ken would be born while I was still there. The next time I went, Kenny was a toddler and Kelly was a baby bump and we went skiing at Tahoe and gambled at night.
 So that is how it began for us. Now, the best friends forever will have to wait at least another year. But time doesn't matter, Everything is like it was yesterday.  Except a little more like the Edna birthday cards we sent each other our whole lives. Soon, we'll be the old ladies on a park bench, hitting people with our purses.
 In the  meantime, we stay connected on Facebook, where Ken and Kelly are also my Facebook friends. Would that be FFF?