Life with Dick: What About Your Friends?

Executive Director of PhillyGayCalendar

How would Carrie Bradshaw put it? "Friendships are like strappy sandals. They carry you through life, they bring comfort, they broadcast the colors of your personality to the world, but sometimes, even your favorite pair of strappy sandals can wear out, or worse, go out of style."

That doesn’t have anything to do with anything. I just wanted to picture myself as a reasonably attractive blonde who’s bedded John Corbett, for a moment. 

So! Friendship! There are many different ways of being a friend to people, here in the futuristic post-2000 whatever-it-is-we’re-calling-this-era. Like, on the internet, you can "follow" people on Twitter, which is sort of like friendship but actually more like stalking with a "reply" button. Or you can "friend" people on Facebook, which is like stalking but also like stalking in reverse, because you’re like "Look at these photos of me! Know the places where I am and have been! Here are some quotes that I enjoy, and things that I have clicked on! Contextualize me!" There are a lot of ways to connect with people online, but I wouldn’t say that connection itself is necessarily equivalent to real friendship, whatever that is. So whatever is it?

Dick says that it’s only real friendship if you can call the person in the middle of the night and they come to bail you out of jail. I guess that’s true, but if you’re like me (and for your sake, I hope not) and went to art school, most of your current friends are broke, so even if they’d take that late-night call, there’s not a whole lot they could do other than maybe offer a few sympathetic clucks. Which is fine. I’m sure I’d make plenty of new friends in the clink anyway.

If the mark of real friendship comes in any one of the hues available at the Lipstick Beauty Salon, one miss Nueva Gabor is a friend indeed. Nueva recently hosted a drag makeup tutorial at her in-home beauty studio, which was attended by a smattering of local creative types, a Dumpsta Player or two, myself, and Liberty City Kings emcee The Notorious OMG. 

Nueva has done my face a few times before, so like a mama bird nudging her chickie out of the nest and into the sky or ground below, she gave me a few basic pointers and then let me do my own thing. My own thing, as it turns out, looks a lot like what happens when a pre-schooler gets into his mother’s makeup bag: a pink/blue/green heap of clumsy smudges with little to no indication of hand-eye-coordination, or even working knowledge of what a face is.

Meanwhile, OMG gave instructions to hir (OMG prefers gender-neutral pronouns) makeup assistant on hir desired look.

"I want my cheekbones to look gaunt," zhe said.

"So stop eating," I replied, because what’s a little shade between friends? Also hir makeup looked better than mine and I was salty about it.

There was, at the end of the evening, a brief photo shoot to show off the results, and in the event that I get hold of one those pictures, I promise to show you the charred remains of it. 

Back at the ranch, Dick is being a real friend to his former co-worker Nene (notnot her real name), who by some fluke of shitty luck simultaneously ended up out of work and without an apartment. We have a guest room here at the Old Glory row home, so Nene’s been stay-staying with us. I don’t mind having her around at all. She helps with the house and the pets, and when Dick and I argue, or rather, when Dick and I are in a room together, she usually sides with me. Not only that, but she’s the biggest fan of the Life with Dick experience I know.

A little while back, the three of us were in the living room, and Dick and I were rehashing the week that our gas went wonky and we had to go without heat or hot water for eight days.

"Was I much of a bear that week?" Dick asked me.

"Well, yeah," I said, "But you’re always a bear. You –"

"WHAT?! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK Y– wait. What were you gonna say?"

"I was going to say that you’re a bear because you’re grumpy and you yell, but then you interrupted me by being grumpy and yelling."

Nene stifled a laugh, shrugged, and said, "Life with Dick."

In a few short months, Nene has evolved from a casual acquaintance of mine into a roommate, and now I consider her a real friend, if for no other reason than by living here she has acquired more dirt on me than almost anyone else I know. Like, for example, the details of the New Year’s Day debacle that maybe I will write about in a decade or so. 

I guess, in the end, that’s what real friendship boils down to: intimate knowledge. Your real friends know the individual behind the crafted public persona, beyond the friendly face you put on your social network, and in this very special community of ours, some of your real friends even know what you’re like in bed. Your real friends know you well enough to sass you without fear of getting cut. Your real friends know how to be honest with you instead of just humoring you. Your real friends would bail you out of jail if they had the means. Your real friends know what you are like at your best, and at your worst. And that’s why people say that you usually have just a few real friends and everyone else is an acquaintance. Who could afford to have that many potential blackmailers out there?

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