MWF Seeking BFF

by Rachel Bertsche

  I was lucky to get to spend the summers of my youth in a corner of Southwest Maine rather than having to work. My noncamp friends had jobs or family reunions or swim team, while I played soccer and beaded bracelets and learned to water-ski. All in the same day. Even then I knew how good I had it. I was eight years old my first summer at Tripp Lake, and it didn’t take long for me to develop a “cult-like mystical connection” to my seasonal home, as This American Life host Ira Glass once perfectly described it. I became that girl, memorizing lyrics to old songs, keeping scraps from every occasion, having the camp logo spray-painted onto my tennis racket strings. During the school year I counted down the days until I could go back, and during the summer I counted the days I had left. Sara and I would have long talks about how much we “worshipped” life at “The Promised Land.” It was all fairly melodramatic.

  But more important than the activities or the songs or the amenities was how easy it was to be a camper. You didn’t have to be good at anything specific, you just had to have a good attitude. The Spirit of Tripp Lake Award was the most coveted honor each summer, and to win it you just had to be an easygoing, happy, excited kid.

  The school year took work—balancing school and dance class and basketball and friends. When you’re a type-A child with perfectionist tendencies, the stress of those demands can take a toll. At camp the pressure was off. We wore uniforms. There were no boys or schoolwork. Our greatest worry was having last-choice activity sign-ups. It was a two-month-long slumber party.

  If I had to pinpoint one experience from my childhood that is responsible for my perhaps unreasonably high expectations of friendship, camp would be it. If you live in a bunk with six other girls for all that time, they become like sisters. Of course, there were fights—this was a summer camp not a commune—but there was a level of intimacy not rivaled by school or sports teams.

  Which is why I have no qualms about boarding a plane to New York City less than two weeks after my return from Europe and driving six hours up to Maine with Sara and two other ex-campers for Tripp Lake’s one-hundred-year alumni reunion.

  “I made a special camp mix for our road trip,” Sara says when I arrive. “I also went digging in my parents’ apartment and found my old uniforms and our yearbook videos.” She’s as camp-crazy as I am. Maybe more.

  We pop the tapes in the VCR (our camp days were pre-DVD, but it’s completely characteristic of Sara to still have a VCR) at 11 P.M. Three hours later we’re still up watching old movies. This one is from our final summer. 1998. Flashes of other campers bring up obscure memories I didn’t even know I had. Remember when 8-year-old Micah woke us up every morning singing from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat? Remember the year Bruce the rock-climbing counselor hit his head on a barbell and the hippie counselors sang that war chant in the talent show? We’re in the midst of a serious this-isn’t-that-funny-but-I-can’t-stop-laughing fit when Lizzie, Sara’s roommate, emerges half-asleep from her room.

  “Are you guys actually watching this?” We can’t pull it together long enough to respond. She rolls her eyes and heads to the bathroom.

  That night Sara and I share her bed for our sleepover, hoping to doze for all of three hours before we hit the road.

  This isn’t the kind of friendship I’m looking for this year. My relationship with Sara is eighteen years in the making. Nothing I find in twelve months can come close to our intimate understanding of who the other is and who she once was, and I don’t need it to. But it’s certainly an aspirational model of what, with a little time, a friendship can become.

  “Can you guys keep it down? My daughter is trying to sleep.”

  On top of being an alumni weekend, this reunion is also a mother-daughter affair. The bunk next door is home to a group of 7-year-olds and their moms for the weekend, and we’re keeping them up.

  My bunk consists of thirteen women, all of whom were in my age group or the one above me while we were campers. Each of us has slipped back into our roles from those years ago—the class clown, the nurturing mom, the up-for-anything, let’s-just-have-a-party girl. I haven’t spoken to some of these people in ten years, but if a stranger walked in right now she’d think we’ve all been best friends since birth.

  “Bertsche, remember when your hair looked like a boy?”

  No one calls me Rachel here, and no one will ever forget the bowl cut my mom forced on me my first summer. She was scared I wouldn’t brush it and would come home with a rat’s nest for a head. She was probably right.

  (My mother met one of her best friends on the train to their Wisconsin summer camp when she 9 years old. Joy took one look at Mom’s short hair and said, “What are you doing here? This is a camp for girls!” I guess it’s a rite of passage.)

  “Yeah yeah,” I answer Tara, whose bed is next to mine. “Remember when you lip-synched to ‘Chantilly Lace’ for the talent show when you were nine?”

  The night continues like this, everyone shouting out memories, laughing as if the incidents happened yesterday. Sociologist Ray Pahl, author of On Friendship, calls these kinds of friends—the ones that you may not see for years but with whom you can always pick up where you left off—“fossil friends.” It’s a rare breed of pal, usually one with whom you’ve shared a significant life experience, but we all have them.

  Here, the effortlessness of our reconnection has a lot to do with environment. Back when I lived in Manhattan I ran into some of these women on the street or at bars, and while we had nice chats it wasn’t the seamless time travel that is this weekend. Now that we’ve returned to where the relationships were born, we ease back in like we would a comfy pair of footie pajamas.

  On Sunday our caravan packs up the car to road trip home. I’m wearing the necklace I made in enameling yesterday, the same day I went sailing, played field hockey, and climbed the rock wall. In my real life I’d feel exceptionally accomplished having done just one of those things. Where did we find the energy?

  “How was your weekend, camper?” Matt asks me. I tell him about conquering the rock wall and attempting to steer a sailboat, but there’s no use trying to explain the social dynamics of my bunkmates, most of whom he’s never even heard of. That’s another thing about fossil friends. The relationships are so intricately woven into your personal history that to try to isolate just one and relay it to an outsider misses the point. It has no meaning without the full tapestry.

  “We had fun,” I say of my cabin, and leave it at that.

  It’s quite impressive how many meet-and-greet mixer options are out there for someone who’s looking. Since I’ve amped up my participation, my schedule can hardly keep up with the different activities geared toward friend-making. Tonight I am going to a Mac ’n Cheese Mingler, an event hosted by local connector Saya Hillman. By day she’s a video producer and entrepreneur who runs her own digital media company, Mac ’n Cheese Productions (named for the comfort the dish inspires), but she’s best known around Chicago for the “linking strangers to strangers” parties she’s been throwing since 2007. Anyone can sign up to attend one of these getting-to-know-you gatherings, which are held in Hillman’s apartment. The only rule is that you can’t know anyone else in attendance. Apparently Hillman keeps extensive Excel spreadsheets to ensure that no two guests have prior connections. I’m not really sure how Excel would know such a thing, but it’s been working for her for three years so who am I to question the method?

  Matt gives me a ride to Hillman’s house before heading to play poker for the evening. It feels a bit like when my dad used to drop me off at playdates. I even give Matt the it’s-okay-I’m-at-the-door-now-you-can-drive-away wave.

  When I enter Hillman’s two-story loft, with its exposed brick and garden patio, I’m struck by the art house vibe going on here. Low lights, indie music, an older woman wearing dangly parrot earrings. Someone should start reading beat poetry, stat. Instead, Hillman sticks a name tag on my back.

  “There’s a character written on this name tag. As you in
troduce yourself to people, have them give you clues to who you are,” she says. “A fun little icebreaker before we get started.” These are the games I will not miss when this year is over.

  I wander over to Mr. Darcy and Chandler Bing.

  “Oh! You’re my favorite,” I tell Chandler. So helpful.

  “Am I a fictional character?”

  “Yup. I like you, too, actually,” I say to Darcy.

  “I’m not actually even sure who you are,” Chandler tells me. Darcy checks out my back and looks horrified at this admission.

  We decide to move on to more typical small talk—the whole “Where do you live?” “What do you do?” babble. I have a good feeling about Mr. Darcy, a tall redhead whose name is actually Gretchen, but before we can get too deep into a conversation Hillman separates us into three groups. Gretchen and I are not together.

  “I’m handing out a list of questions,” our host says. “Everyone in the group should answer and then as a group you’ll pick the most interesting response to share with the whole room.”

  I settle into my group of three other women and two men as Hillman hands me the list. It’s long.

  “Okay. Question one. Share one unusual fact about yourself,” I say. We stare at each other blankly. “I’ll start. I was the president of my high school gospel choir.”

  “I can talk really fast,” Ruth, who is sitting across from me, says. “I was on America’s Funniest People for speed-talking.”

  “Really? Can you show us?” I ask.

  “You need to give me something to talk about.”

  “Cars,” offers Darryl, the guy sitting next to me.

  “WellIreallyneedanewcarbutIdon’tknowwhattobuycausemyoldcarhardlyruns.…”

  Forget what I said about Logan. Ruth is the Micro Machines guy. She goes on about cars for probably thirty more seconds. It’s a much better icebreaker than any guessing game.

  “Question four. What is an off-the-beaten-path activity that you’ve discovered in Chicago?”

  “Freezing,” Darryl says. Five confused faces turn in his direction. “I’m a freezer.”

  “Excuse me?” Ruth asks.

  “I freeze. It’s performance art. At a designated time we all freeze for twenty minutes.”

  “Freeze as in stop moving?” I ask. When he said he was a freezer my mind first went to the dessert portion of my refrigerator, then to a David-Blaine-stuck-in-a-giant-ice-cube type of trick.

  “Yes,” he says, though it’s clear what he wanted to say was, “Duh.”

  Everyone is intrigued. We’re firing questions at him. “Where do you do it?” “How many of you are there?” “Do people ever get mad?” “Do they throw things at you?” “Have you ever had to stop early?”

  “Hard-core freezers could freeze in an avalanche,” he says. He is so passionate about extolling the virtues of freezing that he doesn’t even notice the pun. “I’ve only broken once. It was in front of DePaul University and the security guard of the dorm was not having it. He kept asking us what we were doing, but of course I couldn’t tell him, and then he called the cops. So I had to explain that this was an artistic expression. It was devastating to have to call it early.”

  We’re collectively mesmerized—if a bit amused—by his passion for standing still.

  “You guys should try it. Such a phenomenal rush,” he says. “It will seriously change your life.”

  I wonder if I sound like this when I talk about camp.

  “Question six. What’s the best or worst date you’ve ever been on?”

  “I had a really horrible date with this one girl,” Darryl chimes in. “You see, I’m not very good with small talk. I really like to get to the core of who a person is.”

  Yeah, so we’ve learned. If we’ve discovered anything in the last five questions it’s that Darryl is, shall we say, intense.

  “This one girl, I just couldn’t get to her. I was trying and trying to break her, and she wouldn’t open up. Eventually she mentioned that she really wanted to travel to Europe. So I asked her, ‘If Europe were an animal, what animal would it be?’ ”

  Silence. The entire group is once again staring at him, stunned.

  “You actually said that?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think she thinks you were her worst date, because you asked her what animal Europe would be?”

  Darryl shrugs.

  Our evening started at 9, and by the time the question portion is over and the subsequent sharing with the group ends, it’s midnight and I’ve hardly had a chance to talk to Gretchen.

  “Everyone keeps telling me they don’t know who my name-tag person is,” I tell her as our groups finally split up. I’m one of the last remaining guests still wearing a name tag.

  “Seriously?” She sounds disgusted. “It’s Ira Glass.” She has just enough sass for me to know I’m going to like her.

  The next morning—because friending stops for nothing!—I donate my time to Chicago’s City Farm by way of One Brick, a no-commitment volunteer organization. Plenty of people have suggested that volunteer work would be the perfect way to make friends, but most of the programs I’m interested in require a regular commitment or a rigorous orientation process, neither of which I have time for this year. One Brick staffs other nonprofits, so you can sign up for whichever projects sound fun and fit into your schedule. Plus, the organization encourages a “social atmosphere around volunteering” and invites volunteers to gather at a local restaurant after each event. You do good, you make friends—a win-win. (And if it’s a BFF bust, at least you’ve changed the world and all that.)

  My morning consists mostly of weeding, but for a brief moment I get to pick beets. We only need one hundred and I come late to the party, so I only actually pick three, but still. I am basically a farmer!

  Lunch afterward is an eclectic crowd, and I’m bummed because Marvin, one of the guys I was weeding with, doesn’t join us. I was hoping to make him my first platonic straight male friend. Of course, there’s plenty of debate as to whether that’s really possible.

  I recently asked Matt what he thought about my taking on a man-friend.

  “No,” he said.

  “No, what? No I can’t be friends with a guy?”

  “No you can’t ask a straight guy out on a friend-date. It wouldn’t work. He’d think you were hitting on him.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. If I were wearing my ring?”

  “It’s just hard to imagine you putting all this effort into a relationship with another man.”

  I’m not sure what I think. I do have male friends—guys like Sam who were there when Matt and I got together, and a few at the office who serve as my work husband (in an office full of women, it’s imperative to have one drama-free man on your side). But it is hard to imagine how I could initiate a platonic male-female friendship out in the real world. It’s great in theory and I’d like to believe it would be no problem—I’m not delusional enough to think every guy I meet would fall for me—and yet I’ve seen When Harry Met Sally approximately twenty times. It’s branded into my brain.

  It’s a moot point because Marvin isn’t at lunch. Instead I sidle up to Margarita, one of the group leaders, on the walk to the restaurant and secure the seat next to her at lunch. This is not my first rodeo.

  FRIEND-DATES 32, 33, 34, 35. My participation this month has produced a good handful of friend prospects.

  Sonia from Grubwithus meets me for dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant. Aside from our mutual love of Harry Potter, we share interests in Self magazine and peanut sauce. It’s not a ton to go on, but at this point I can pretty much talk about anything.

  I found Veronica, a recent Chicago transplant from North Carolina, in the comments section of Jezebel.com. I figure these big blogs call it “community” for a reason, so I emailed her through the site after reading her comment on an article about … drumroll … how to make friends. We meet at a wine bar and talk for three hours.

  Mac ’n Che
ese Mingler Gretchen and I go to lunch a week after we met. I’m into her. She’s got a dry sense of humor that simultaneously intrigues and intimidates me. She’s in the midst of all these self-improvement projects—a hundred-mile bike-ride challenge, a dabbling in the Mennonite church—that one might call a quarter-life crisis. I can relate. Some might—and do—say the same about my year.

  One Brick Margarita invites me to go shopping in Chinatown. We peruse the stores and eat a quick lunch at Tasty Diner. That’s actually what it’s called, and it delivers. My egg drop soup is, in fact, quite tasty. When I board the El train back to Lincoln Park I’ve got new pashminas (two for ten dollars!), a pair of black Mary Jane flats (seven dollars instead of five because I opted for the fancy velvet), and a small framed canvas Andy Warhol print.

  It was a good month for new friends. My parting with Sonia was of the noncommittal “we should do this again” variety, but I invited Veronica to join the cooking club—apparently she makes mean biscuits and grits—and she accepted. Gretchen and I discovered we know a couple in common, so we made tentative triple-date plans. Margarita and I made a date to see the education documentary Waiting for Superman later this week.

  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my dates have gotten more successful now that I’m choosing them instead of letting them choose me. And yet, when I catch wind of a local friend matchmaker, I’m pretty eager to hand over the reins.

  Joe Drake prefers to be called a friend broker. He compares himself to a real estate agent, but instead of finding you a house, he’ll set you up with a friend. I found out about his service, Meet Joe, through a recent article in Time Out Chicago. Like Saya Hillman, Drake is a connector. The 31-year-old entrepreneur has contacts all over town, and now, for only $29.95, he’ll introduce me to a few of them.

  I signed up for the service as soon as I read the TOC profile. If I were more narcissistic I’d think the local Chicago area was learning about my search and creating companies just for me. And while, yes, hiring a matchmaker goes against the concept of culling through the friend-options and picking the perfect fit myself, it might be even better. I’ll meet with Drake, he’ll get a sense of my winning personality, and find me my Princess Charming. No glass slipper necessary.