the beauty queens

You see the shoes? We didn't talk about wearing the same style today. We three met for lunch to celebrate Milette's birthday. Two weeks from now we'll have lunch again to celebrate mine, and again in October to celebrate Irene's.We three friends are so different from each other. Milette is a saint, but she wears hot lingerie; Irene is a self-proclaimed pokwang and is determined not to marry, but she gives the soundest advice on marital problems; I am me. :-)

We three love books. Irene and I both love Pat Conroy, and... uh, we're not sure about what Milette loves to read.

We three work in the same building, but we eat lunch together only thrice a year. During lunch, we talk about anything under the sun, under the stars, under the blanket. We exchange views on topics that would make other women blush. And we ask the waiters to take pictures of us after lunch, in the same place, every year. For lunch today, we have 26 pictures. I guess we'll laugh about it for the next couple of days.

More than the companionship, the lunches, the gifts on birthdays and at Christmas, I love the simplicity of our friendship. I laugh a lot when I'm with them. They taught me to work more patiently on my husband, to be tough at work, to buy expensive bags and shoes. I learn a lot from them, but most of the time I learn things about myself.

We call ourselves the beauty queens. It's a private joke in the ordinariness of our everyday working lives. There is happiness in our uncomplicated acceptance of each other.

These lunch dates on our birthdays, they are not just to eat an expensive lunch together or to giggle over our sex lives. They are celebrations of our friendship, and the conviction that in our own right, in our own worlds, we are beauty queens. Because when we're 70 years old, we'll look at our albums of our lunch dates, three times a year, and we'll sigh and say,

"Shit, weren't we beautiful?"