F•R•I•E•N•D•S-part 1
“Tell me how old you are without telling me how old you are?”
I watched the television show Friends when it originally aired and I was slightly older than the ages of the characters.
The show had such a long and successful run, but I ended up not continuing to watch through to the finale. I stopped watching by April of 2001. Hey now, no judging. I’m no quitter. You see, the score had tipped. We were officially outnumbered having just given birth to our third and final child. We now had three children ages four and younger. Speaking of finales, our son’s entry to the world was much anticipated. What wasn’t anticipated was me being placed on bedrest after his birth due to hemorrhaging. I didn’t know it at the time, but my long history of avid television watching would go on a ten+ year hiatus. My regularly scheduled programming was being canceled and replaced with doctor’s appointments, surgeries, and a major redirection of life as I currently knew it.
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The year was 1994. A brand new show called Friends was getting a lot of hype. NBC was picking up steam with its Must See TV campaign. This was my golden age of television. My friends and I lived for the Thursday nights lineup - Seinfeld, Mad About You, Friends, ER- ahhh, *sigh. We weren’t just watching shows about some characters. No, we were getting caught up on the lives of our onscreen friends. This shared experience, because we cared so deeply about them, brought all our real life friends together and bonded us is such a strong and unique way.
How into it were we? One friend lived in a coastal city in northern California. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. It was…remote. He did own a television. Because of the terrain and local infrastructure, it had two modes of operation: on and off. Our remedy was to record episodes on VHS. Once a tape was filled up with tv goodness, we mailed it off via United States Postal Service. He was now included because of this new fangled technology that allowed us to record a program. I chuckle now realizing that in our minds, the future had arrived.
We possessed power to record shows and be paged. Yes, I was a proud carrier of my very own beeper. I was an art student by day and an Health Unit Coordinator in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit by night. And by night I mean, the night shift. My shift from 11pm to 0730am was made possible by a very large 4 shots of espresso beverage I secured from the little coffee shop across the street from our apartment. I lived downtown in a high-rise apartment with my then med school boyfriend while I was working at a local pediatric hospital. Although I loved working in the hospital, I had a major epiphany which led to bravely abandoning my pseudo-aspirations to become a nurse. I was studying art, mainly photography and book arts. I spent my time bebopping around town with my camera, creativity, and coffee.
This was my life and I loved it.
