Only With a Best Friend

You know that someone is your best friend when you can spend a day together where everything goes to hell, nothing works the way you wanted it to, and you can still laugh about it during and afterwards.

This past summer, by best friend Jennie and I had a day exactly like that. I'm not sure why I didn't post about it at the time, actually.

The whole thing started with a U2 concert that never happened (well, it got delayed), because Bono threw his back out. We decided that since we still needed our U2 fix, we'd take the local commuter train down to Salt Lake and see the U2 laser show at the planetarium. Genius, right? In theory, yes. In practice, well...

We thought we had it planned out just so. We got down there, stopped past the planetarium to get our tickets and nipped up to the pub to get some fish and chips and beer. We cut the time a little tight and missed the train to take us back down to the planetarium, so we decided to make a run for it. Running after downing some grease-laden fish and chugging a bottle of Bass is not a very good idea. You'd think that by 30 I'd have figured this stuff out, but we were desperate. Did we make it, you ask? We came pretty close, but we looked at our watched when we were 2/3rds of the way there and decided we were too damn slow.

At this point, we looked at each other and couldn't stop laughing. Clearly, we were not meant to see U2 on that day. In hindsight, we may have just chucked the evening in there and gone to catch the train to come home. Instead, we went to a different bar, met Jennie's friend Mike, and drank some more beer.

Eventually we looked at our watches and knew we should be making our way back to the station to catch the last train back to Ogden. Jennie had specifically looked at the time, so we wouldn't miss it....

After we'd sat in the station for twenty minutes, giggling at our amusing evening and feeling good from the beer we'd consumed, we realized there were a) no people at the station and b) no trains at the station. She had looked at the time for the last Saturday train... and it was Friday. The train was gone.

It was 12:30am at this point and I called my mum (who tends to worry about her only child), informed her of the insane situation and assured her that we didn't need to be rescued. Shaking our heads and teasing each other mercilessly, we went back to bar #2, told Mike about our predicament, and accepted his gracious offer of his couch for the remainder of the night. (Thanks, Mike!) After a shared cab ride, a seriously kick-ass pickle, and a heated discussion of The Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen, the three of us succumbed to sleep.

The next morning I blessed the stage manager in me that keeps a toothbrush in her purse and my EdPass that lets me get on any UTA bus for free. While Mike was still snoring away, Jennie and I crept outside to wait for the bus to take us to the train to take us to the other train that would take us home.

If I had been with pretty much anybody else that day I would likely have lost my mind, but because I was with Jennie it was simply funny as hell. And with our paranoia, we've been obscenely early for movies ever since.

Thanks, Babe. And Happy Birthday.