Girls’ Night Out Regular ‘Sisterhood’ Gatherings Help Group Of Women Negotiate Their Way Through Life
The sacrosanct sisterhood of Girls’ Night Out has been broached only once.
A man was allowed to attend one of the dinner gatherings a group of women friends has been holding every Tuesday for nearly two years.
“All his friends were out of town, and it was his birthday,” explained Stephenie Olson, 29, a managed-care contract negotiator. “So we said, ‘All right, we feel really bad for you. You can come, as long as you adhere to secrecy.’ “
So they had their usual evening, during which the conversation turned to the best sexual positions in which to achieve orgasm. The young man, normally a wisecracking sort, sat in red-faced silence.
No man has been allowed into Girls’ Night since, leaving the Girls free from worry about tender male sensibilities.
Girls’ Night Out is the effort of 11 women - a core of former sorority sisters plus extra friends - not to lose touch as they traverse their twenties.
They are smart, funny and disproportionately blond. They take turns cooking and hosting, and follow certain traditions, as explained on a recent Tuesday at Ellen Roberts’ Chicago apartment:
1. Nothing leaves the group.
(Unless you count the time that one member earnestly asked the others whether their boyfriends farted in front of them, because hers did and it made her uncomfortable, a story that proved irresistably repeatable.)
2. No ditching the Girls for a boy.
“It’s sacred,” said Shonne Fegan, 25, a public-relations account executive. “If you start dating, you have to tell them you can’t go out with them on Tuesday nights.”
3. No matter how much the hostess cooks, it gets eaten.
4. No matter how bad something tastes, it gets eaten.
This last custom has been sorely tested by a mint pie that tasted like chewing gum and by a gastrointestinally remarkable bulghur chili.
“It expanded in your stomach, so we were all walking around like - uhhhhhh,” said Erica Campbell, 26, a restaurant chain marketing manager, pushing her flat belly outward.
Memo to the men so desperate to know what the women talk about that they make crank calls: Though all but Roberts are single, it is not generally men.
“Unless we’re having a breakup,” Campbell said.
A bigger subject is jobs. “How we can quit our jobs and open up our own business,” Roberts specified, a subject that took up one entire Girls’ Night.
Another night featured tales of first tries at inserting tampons, an entertainment whose hilarity may escape men.
Absent such themes, the conversation veers freely.
“I had a sex dream; Bob Dole was in my bed two nights ago,” Campbell said, eating rocky road ice cream from the carton.
“Did he have his pen?” Roberts asked.
The girls mean no offense to men. They have so many friends of all kinds that 500 people attended their one-year anniversary party last February at a bar. (Attendence was swelled, it must be pointed out, when someone faxed the invitation to several commodities exchanges.)
But there is something special about women-only time. The evening doesn’t break down into little knots of people, and there is none of that most unwelcome male response to the airing of grievances: constructive advice.
“We don’t want a solution,” explained Lisa Hecker, 25, a headhunter. “We just bitch.”
Girl talk is frank, funny and delicious. We crave it; we call girlfriends long distance for it; when our lives grow too hectic with husbands and children, we miss it.
And if eating cookie dough is part of it, all the better.