It's Flo's Birthday

My friend Judy's birthday is today. I met her in 1992 when I studied in London, England, and whe she adopted me as her upstate New York, nerdy, non-cosmopolitan friend. I was nineteen at the time and she was twenty, and she tried desperately to make me more hip than I could ever be. Eighteen years later, she's a mother of two beautiful daughters and has begun a jewelry collection in Brooklyn, New York. Her site will be up soon: http://www.luckystarjewelrynyc.com/ - this is years after selling George Forman grills.

As the world's karma works, Judy married a man from Louisville and it helped us to keep our friendship going. Before her marriage, she often came to spend holidays with me in Syracuse and, as my father said, "I've never seen such a thin person eat so much."

Judy called me Archie and I called her Flo. Not sure where that came from, but we traveled many places together: Ireland, Long Island, Las Vegas, Kentucky, and even Tennessee. In many ways, she was very central to my young twenties and I hold the adventures we had close to most of what I cherish from those days, including the time Bette Midler was filming in the early a.m. outside her apartment and Judy yelled, "Would someone tell that $@#$# to shut up, we're still trying to sleep!"

And that is why I say, "Happy Birthday, Flo!" I love you, miss you, and think of you often.