And Four More, And Three More....

When I was in my early twenties I knew this girl named Susan.  She was a coworker of mine who became a good friend, as most fag hags in my life have, and we used to get up to all kinds of mischief together.  Like the time we bought tickets for a U2 concert in Philadelphia even though we lived in DC, then didn't tell another friend who agreed to drive us to the concert that we'd already seen the show at RFK stadium without her.  Or the time we decided to run a 5K in Central Park on New Years Eve with the promise of fireworks and free champagne at the finish line and ended up in some dingy NYC hotel with separate rooms and an adjoining bathroom of all things.  Or when she convinced me that buying a pop art painting of a gecko from a street artist outside the Met was a good investment - I still have the painting, and met the artist again many years later, but it's not worth shit.  Or all the weekend trips we'd take to CostCo for groceries that we split, or the meals we cooked together so we could theoretically save money by not going out to lunch every day, which gave us plenty of time to do Denise Austin workout videos in the makeshift gym in our office building on our lunch hour.  So this morning when I met Denise Austin I was reminded of my friend Susan as I thanked her for starting me on my path to health and whatever kind of wellness this mudslide of a body can achieve.