Entourage Reunion 2010

Due a crazy, busy summer and lots of time spent with the kids at various pools, inflatables, and parks in the greater Rutherford County area, I have had no time to blog. However, as Hardy has now started kindergarten and I will be starting graduate school in a matter of weeks, I hope to begin blogging again.

Last weekend I did the best thing I have done in ages. I went on a girl’s weekend, a retreat of Ya-Ya proportions. As a bit of background, a group of five women became friends while attending Mississippi University for Women. We somehow (the mists of memory does not accurately reflect how this happened) gave ourselves the name of “The Entourage”. I think the name came from the fact that we always travelled in a pack in college, acting as each other’s Entourage. We were the Entourage long before HBO and Jeremy Piven usurped the name (I believe they owe us royalties for that).

The Entourage was an unstoppable force of nature. All of my best college memories involve at least one, and usually more, of the Entourage. We went to a moderately small, predominantly female university in a small town. However, we managed to have some wonderful times together. Life, however, intruded as it often does. After college and marriage, I simply drifted away from these wonderful ladies, a fact that I will regret until my dying day. I have no excuse for why I did not work harder to keep them in my life. While I hate talking on the phone and am the worst correspondent (I have reams of letters that I began that simply either never got finished or were posted in the mail), I wish I had tried to find them sooner than I did.

Thanks to the glories of the internet and to Facebook, we all reconnected in the last year. At the New Year, we begin to discuss, via Facebook, the idea of having a reunion. We loved the idea of spending a weekend together, catching up and enjoying each other’s company. After many discussions and setbacks, San Antonio was chosen as the venue (home of one of the Entourage) and the end of July was chosen.

In retrospect, the decision to go to San Antonio at the end of July was perhaps not our best decision. While it was terribly hot and humid, the weather did not mar what was possibly one of the best weekends I have spent in ages.

The best way to describe the Entourage was uttered by Traci, who said the Entourage was “like the Ya-Ya Sisterhood without the diagnosed alcoholism and more profane.” (If you have to ask what the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is then you most likely would not understand the underlying ethos of the Entourage). It is a crazy mixture of Southern sass, sangria, margaritas, beer, cigarettes (though not as much as in the past), a love of movies, a refusal to take life too seriously, and a serious intolerance for bullshit.

In many ways, we picked up where we had left off ten years ago. We tended to sit in the same spot in the car as we did a decade ago, and we laughed over the same things we did. We looked at old pictures and remembered our wild youth of stalking professors, doing shots of Jack Daniels (which I still cannot smell without getting sick), and “stinky nachos”. We went shopping together, and I had forgotten the pure bliss of shopping with a group of ladies who have no problems in letting you know if something is flattering. We went to the Alamo (a bit of a disappointment) and drank copiously of various libations (we had to beat the heat somehow). I went home more relaxed than I have been in months, despite the fact that I never slept more than five hours a night.

If I could change one thing about life, I would have the Entourage living within 20 miles of each other. My sanity would benefit greatly from having weekly contact with these wonderful ladies. My children would learn valuable lessons from an up-close study of the Entourage. They would learn about courage and sacrifice. About what you do when you lose almost everything you own in a natural disaster. About how to embrace life and when to say no to the canned cheese. About relationships and laughter and how to detect when someone is bullshitting you. About how to be a great person and a good friend.