We Got Our Groove On!!!!!!

So, if you missed out on Saturday night's "Girls, Get Your Groove On!", you missed a night of such incredible fun!!!!!!!!!!!! There were a few of us gleaning our moves in my living room, and we found ourselves laughing, realizing that we ALL love Disco (weird) no matter what era we grew up in, and that this is THE most painless way of working out...ever.

For the next time: disco ball; disco lights and more music!!!!!!!!!!! Two hours wasn't long enough either...we were grooving well into 11pm. And ladies, there was plenty of time for chatting, giggling and a good ole chin wag.

Let's do it again! In fact, everyone there INSISTS that we do this again.

Girls Get Your Groove On

This weekend, on Saturday, at my house there will be what we hope will be the first of many "Girls, Get Your Groove On!" dance nights. My girlfriend, Kim, hosts an event like this in Winnipeg (Canada) every month. Usually on a Thursday night, I think. Most of the women invited to our event are working Mum's so they requested a Saturday night thang. So, Saturday it is.

The idea is to come and dance, like nobody is watching. The idea is to bring either actual or the idea of actual songs that are your ABSOLUTE favourite songs in the whole world to dance to.

Kim and I talked about this at great length in the months prior to her actually hosting this event. Her and I used to haunt The Pyramid or Times Change DanceClub, in Winnipeg, looking for good dance music and POSSIBLY a boy that might notice our snake hips. During our years of serial monogamy, we would usually dance for the flavour of the month/year and hope that sex would be at the end of the night. Our dance, a precursor to what romp might occur between the sheets, in the hallway, on the stairs or wherever. Might not make it home...could be in the car.

HOWEVER, we are both married now, as are the majority of our friends AND have kids and the bodies that go with making those babies and being a bit too busy to have time to go clubbing every night and sweating off the flub, we're all 30-something (maybe 40 something) and wanna move. So, nightly dancing isn't REALLY an option...unless we want to neglect our families. SO, a "Get Your Groove On" night was born...mostly because Kim, wisely, thought something along the lines of, "I'm too old to go dancing in a club, and I'm NOT looking to pick up AND even if I went JUST to dance, I might LOOK like I'm vying for Couger Action Magazine's Lady of The Month award, and I'm not...I just wanna dance, shake my booty and let go..." Me too. AND, it turns out SO DO a bunch of my married-with-children girlfriends up here in the middle of nowhere in Northern Ontario.

So...this Saturday, we are creating our own fun. Ladies only. I don't mind if kids tag along and wanna play upstairs with my girls (they'd like it too.) Bring your music selections (mine include Abba's "Dancing Queen"...I'm sooooooooo cheezeball and Dexy's Midnight Runners' "Come On Eileen"), comfy clothes, and dance like nobody's watching...because they aren't. We all just wanna groove.

7:30 pm start.

Facial Hair

Ordinarily, women aren't supposed to have facial hair. I guess maybe I haven't read enough books on peri-menopausal or menopausal women to know better, but over the past year or so, my moustache is getting darker, longer and thicker. This hardly seems right. That my estrogen and progesterone levels should give way to their masculine counterpart, testosterone, somehow seems...well, wrong. I've got tits and a hoo hoo (vagina) and, well, I'm not supposed to have facial hair. It's one thing for your body to sag a bit after breast-feeding little people for years, and to give way to gravity but wirey, little black hairs sprouting on the softness of my cheeks and chin?

I started using Jolene's cream bleach when I was about 15. My girlfriend K. (thanks K.) told me that I should try it. She'd been using it for years. Her moustache was well on its way to developing into a goatee or van dyke, but she believed that turning it from its natural hue of auburn brown to golden blonde improved her odds of being noticed by boys. So, as any good friend would do, she passed me a wee spatula one sleep over and said, "Here, try this. Put it on for 5 minutes and lie down the WHOLE time. DON'T get up."

I thought that was odd to have to lie down to take care of the increasingly dark shadow under my nose but it turned out to be solid advice. That cream bleach sort of bubbles and gets airy and starts to fall off if you stand up. It doesn't get along with gravity. Five minutes of weird burning on my top lip proved to be one of the moments in life when you half expect a fanfare of angels to sing, "aaaaaaaah" in a sugary angelic like way. No angels. No trumpets. No fanfares. But hot dang, you couldn't see the dark shadow under my nose anymore. No more whispy fine brown hairs lingering on my top lip. I was...attractive.

Oddly enough, I'm not sure ANY boy ever noticed the hair on my top lip BEFORE or AFTER creme bleach. My husband, who knew me back then, says he only noticed my eyes and lips, no moustache. I had the moustache (peach fuzz), but it didn't bother him. It only bothered me. However, now that I'm a year away from 40, the odds are stacked against my aging body in ways that I couldn't even have predicted. Like, HOW does a white hair grow over 3 inches long on my shoulder every few months? And why is it that my husband is the one to find it? "Er, honey, keep still..." PING. OUCH. With my dukes ready to wallop him one, he stands triumphantly announcing, "wow, look at this doozy..." White hairs are better than black ones though. And those hairs I have, that are of the darker persuasion, well, they are sprouting up on my chin!!!! Not that you'll ever see them on me.

When I was a kid, there was nothing more disgusting and grotesque than an older woman, or old lady, with chin hairs. Well, unless they were BLACK chin hairs. I've had bone straight hair my whole life and all of a sudden I've got wirey, black, slightly kinked chin hairs. Not many thankfully, but they show up...every month, in the same spot. And are met with my LaCross tweezers. PING. Tricksters they are too, because they always look like they come out with the hair root, but alas one month later, there they are sprouting up like April asparagus.

Jolene's isn't really helping me anymore. I guess I can't diss a 20 year relationship, and I won't, but I'm sadly dissapointed. Obviously, not with Jolene's so much as my body's inability to continue responding well to the promise of sweetness. My moustache hairs have doubled in length and are starting to curl over my top lip. Ok, they are completely invisible to the average observer of me, however, I KNOW they are there and, I've begun plucking them too. So why, WHY, don't moustache hairs behave the same way as eyebrow hairs? Pluck them out long enough and eyebrow hair ceases to grow. Pluck your moustache hairs and ladies, they just get LONGER & THICKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There is some kind of cosmic injustice in a world that permits women to have facial hair, and won't deem it appropriate.

I shouldn't complain. I know there are women out there that literally have beards. Again, what kind of cosmic injustice is this???? And what if you can't afford to buy Jolene's creame bleach by the truck load or get electrolysis? Or, tweezers? It's not like women can shave this facial hair the way that men do. No-one wants to sidle up to a little femininely five oclock shadow. No-one that I've met in this world so far, anyway.

So, as I approach my monthly reminder of not conceiving, and I'm grumpy, bloated, craving chocolate and hate how my clothes fit...WHY do I have to contend with facing the mirror and those tiny shoots of black popping out of my facial pores? Isn't it bad enough that women even menstruate AND have PMS, do we have to throw facial hair onto the pile too!?!?!?!?

I won't even mention the moles. grrrrrrrrrrrumble.