Saturday Night Worthy

We all have different friends for different types of fun or activities. Some girlfriends are great to share a laugh over the National Inquirer's bathing suit issue. Some girlfriends are great listeners and some give good advice. Some can lament with you about your husband's last annoying argument and others you don't bother to share it with at all. Some are great shopping with because she can go at the same speed or has the same taste as you and enjoys spending hours in the dressing room with you, critiquing each other's outfit.

Each girlfriend serves her purpose as your friend (otherwise, we wouldn't bother with them) and some fulfill more than one need. Usually, the more your friends are "good" for, the better friends with them you become.

But then there's a friendship criteria that seems to rise above the rest. It's the final "test" question of how much you like your girlfriend--is she Saturday Night Worthy (SNW)? Though not many will admit it as readily as I, some of your girlfriends that you love Sunday through Thursday just do not cut it when it comes to girls night out on Saturday. And of course, you can't share with her the fact that you just don't deem her SNW. She may be a quality candidate for a Friday night happy hour or a Sunday afternoon film and lite bite. But SNW has much higher expectations.

But we all have girlfriends not SNW. Maybe it's her two-decades-behind hairstyle or outfit. Perhaps a bit superficial but that is a detractor for a good-looking group of girls looking to cut the rope line at a Saturday Night hotspot. But more importantly, it's probably her too-uptight attitude like when a man checks her out and she runs in the other direction. Most often, especially for the 30 and up crowd, the queen of the NOT SNW girlfriends is the one who corners their other friends in a bar to share a cute story about what their darling little child did on the toilet the other day.

I don't want to hear complaining about "what time are we going to get home" nor "How much did that drink cost?" or "I'm tired. I've got to get up with the kids at 6am." I don't want to go out for a "nice" dinner and have sweet conversations such as"Have you tried the wonderful new lean cuisine?" or "did you see that new time-out trick on SuperNanny last night?"and be home by 9:30. I do that Monday through Friday, thank you.

My point is that for whatever the reason, these girlfriends are best left at home. Maybe I'm just getting old and craggy but my Saturday nights out with my girlfriends are few and far between. They're precious girl-time for me. I don't want to talk about my own kids for a few hours, so you can expect I certainly don't want to talk about yours! I want to get dressed up, feel fabulous and young (ish); kick up my heels and hit the dance floor with my girlfriends. I want gritty girl talk and I want to be completely honest. I just can't do that with girls not SNW.

I want to be me for a few hours. Not a daughter or wife or mother. For a few blissful hours I want to be fun and fancy free Tracy. It's the girls that just don't know how to have fun that are not deemed SNW. We're all happy or happily married. We just want to have fun, let our hair down and party like it's 1999. It's not a big request. It seems rather simple.

However, I found myself getting bogged down, weighted down actually, when I had to drag along a friend-of-a-friend or one of my own not SNW friends on my Saturday night who quite frankly, is a bore. Boring may be too strong a word so perhaps "pleasant" is more succinct. After enough times of having a pleasant time out, I decided to call it quits. I only want to go out with my girlfriends that I've deemed SNW. Everyone else will have to try to book me the other six nights of the week.

Not that there's actually a list of criteria one must pass to be on my SNW "list". It's just one of those known things. I know I'm not the only gal who feels this way either. My friend Julie calls it the "edge factor". She doesn't want to be friends with just "nice." People have to have some "edge" to them. We always laugh that even though we really can't define that word ourselves, we just know it when we see it in someone. It must exist because whenever we've met a new person who had "edge", we both would recognize it immediately. The same can be said about SNW. My friend Andrea gets that too and we're almost always on the same page about it

I'm not saying I'll never do anything with those girls ever on a Saturday night. Of course I will. But when it comes to planning my girls night out, I'm pretty strict on reviewing my SNW list and checking it twice. I know some girls think I'm a bitch about it. Maybe it's not one of my best personality traits but I'm okay with that.