Happy Birthday to my Fellowship of the Rings

           I have three excellent friends who are having birthdays this week. Virgos are not known for tolerating the fiery Aries energy but these three never leave any residual burns. Let me tell you about them a la “Lord of the Rings”.

March 25^th-The first of the Aries birthdays is my darling therapist friend, Mary Kay. She hails from the shire (Faribault, Minnesota) where she started out life as a hobbit. Her petite stature did not deter her from leaving the shire for the bright lights of Gondor (aka Minneapolis). There we met working on a psychiatric unit and formed the fellowship of the wings. She left for Rohan (aka Smith College in Northampton, Mass) to complete a Master’s Degree in Social Work and I flew to the Woodland Realm (aka Seattle) to pursue foolishness (sorry, I've never had the altruistic vigor for the endurance trials of mythic quests). She has reinvented herself as ‘Kate’ but I have never yielded to this persona because I knew her when she was a hobbit. We are bonded not only by our fellowship but by our age, idiosyncratic sense of humor, and our passion for our obsessive behaviors. While she is currently preoccupied with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, I am an absorbed sapiophile. This makes for hilarious texts and emails. Whenever I am emotionally paralyzed or overwhelmed, Mary Kay’s counseling and dry wit make me feel better than Zoloft or heroin or both. As an incomparable therapist, she invokes the best of her academic background with the emotional clarity of the most sensible person on the planet. She is the only one of my hobbit friends I will allow to call me by the diminutive of my birth name. So all of you Northamptonites, wish my friend Mary Kay a wonderful birthday. Happy Birthday, Mary Kay. I love you. Thank you for being such a faithful, funny, and fabulous friend.

March 27^th-Aries birthday number two is my pasquinian friend, Peter. He hails from Gondor, too, but I met him here at Moria (aka County Public Health). He resembles Legolas only with a little more girth. Unlike Legolas, Peter does not shoot his arrows straight, he is gay. We met eight years ago when he worked in my department as our contract analyst. Shortly thereafter, he was promoted to another division in Rivendell. A few years ago we reconnected when he returned to the mines of Moria to audit contracts. We have an ongoing argument over which of us is truly more of a gay man. He has introduced me to a new harem of gay men, making me one of the most gayed-up women in this west coast city. Because he lives only a mile away from me, we frequently do a number gay activities together like, searching for a unique brand of body wash at Costco, confessing my deepest darkest secrets amusing him to no end, and brunching occasionally with the rest of the gay harem Sunday mornings. Currently he is pressuring me to join the Sauron (aka the YMCA to swim with him). I have objected to this on the grounds those misogynist bastards at Mordor would never let me use the men’s locker room. Had he not been raised a Mormon and I not a Catholic, we probably would get married. But we all know these mixed marriages never really work out. A former suitor once mockingly referred to him as ‘St. Peter’, an apropos affectation I agree is fitting. Happy Birthday, St. Peter. I love you. Thank you for being my most faithful suitor.

March 29^th-The final Aries birthday belongs to Galadriel (aka Grace), a tall blond, porcelain-skinned, Swedish/German descended elf. We lived in the same fourplex in Gondor. Eventually she was instrumental in getting me employed at Isengard (an outpatient behavioral clinic she worked for) where I became adept at quelling the fears of phobics, extinguishing the consequating behaviors of obsessive-compulsives, and evading sex predators getting aversive operant conditioning (most of whom were the male staff). Grace embodies her name; she is a Galadriel Renaissance woman. Without a doubt, she is an intelligent, considerate, adventurous, humorous, and warm-hearted woman of substance. My nickname for her from our Isengard days is ‘the Madonna’. Truly, to gaze upon her placid countenance one would believe her to be a saintly woman. One of the funniest pictures I have of her is when she borrowed my nun costume for a Halloween party. In this full Holy Orders regalia picture, she is holding what appears to be a glass of whiskey and smoking a cigarette. She has no shame, and better yet, has a hysterical sense of irreverence which is unusual for a non-Catholic. For my 60^th birthday last year she sent me a scrapbook of the 60 reasons why she loves me as a friend. It was a compilation of stories, memories, and pictures of our long history together. I am not known for being a crying sort of woman but I teared up considerably when I realized the effort she put into conveying the depth of her feelings for me through this simple scrapbook. Attention all of you in Austin, Texas:  March 29^th is Grace’s day. Happy Birthday, Grace. I love you. Thank you for your jocosity, sage wisdom, and unfailing support.