#tbt the weekend we became friends for real

A million years ago, my friend Rebecca got married out on Block Island. It was a beautiful autumn weekend. I car-pooled up from New York with my friend Felicia, and two other people, John and Allison. We were the New York contingent. Felicia and I were already friends, we worked together at this crazy start-up job, a job still legendary to those of us who experienced it. Allison and Rebecca were friends, and I had met Allison before at a party – Rebecca was the connection. (The party was at a warehouse apartment in Dumbo, one of those big illegal apartments in industrial spaces you used to be able to do. I can’t remember if this was the party where Liev Schrieber showed up in leather pants and you could feel the pheromonal charisma emanating off of him, it was crazy, girls went insane when he showed up. And he wasn’t a huge star then. People didn’t go crazy because he was a celebrity. People went crazy because he had “it”, you could feel it. I think he might have been doing Hamlet at the Public at the time, or something like that. It might have been another party where Liev showed up. New York in the late 90s was a magical time. Never to be repeated.) Allison and I took the subway home from that party and had a long serious conversation about religion. We were on the subway and it was like 2 in the morning and we were discussing religion. We didn’t know each other at all so the ease of conversation and the depth was a good sign. But this experience didn’t transform into a friendship. What transformed us into a friendship with a capital F was the weekend on Block Island. First of all, the four of us – me, Felicia, Allison and John – had this whole separate adventure, bonding us together, on a road trip, rooming with each other in one of the old hotels on Block Island. John was in heaven, chilling out with three crazy vivacious women for a whole weekend. We kept teasing him by talking about girl stuff, like periods and pap smears. He’d be like, “Okay, okay, please stop it …” It was magic, the way the four of us just gelled together. It was like we had known each other for years. At one point we were at a bar and Allison and I were doing goofy interpretive dances, like we were 11 years old. There was no turning back after that. I can’t imagine my life without her. I don’t have many pictures of that weekend, but someone was taking Polaroids. There’s me – my sister-in-law Maria is behind me (baby Cashel was at the wedding too!) – and then the other three members of the Fabulous Four, John, Allison and Felicia. It’s wild to look at this, knowing how close Allison and I would become. Like, forever friends. Here we are at the very beginning.