f2fb friend #186 sonali srinath walks into the bar and EVERYBODY stares. she wears a pink dress and a smile that makes you feel like someone very gently reached into your chest and replaced your heart with tiny firecrackers. she’s confident and bold, dainty and mischievous. i hadn’t seen much of her since five years ago [...]
f2fb friend #181 john howard is an actor. extremely talented. appears on chicagoland’s many stages every season. acting, of course, is just a day job so he can support his true love insurance brokerage. some of the best actors in the industry–clooney, de niro, penn, nicholson–would trade in all their oscars for a chance to [...]
my f2fb friend #170 carol hansen is a real life cinderella! she tells everyone that it is so and everyone believes her. carol was a single mother living in a small apartment in winnetka, sewing and designing dresses for village matrons to support her daughters. then she met her prince–a recently divorced winnetka father. bluntly, [...]
from rhode island, i got on a commuter train to boston. a short trip but an important one. i was meeting a f2fb friend for the first time. f2fb friend #168 mary mcmanus had worked with my son joseph on a film documenting her struggle with post polio syndrome. [...]
after f2fb friend #160 johnny bladez said goodnight, i prepared for bed and glanced out of the bedroom window to see that he sat on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette. we had had some laughs and the two parties had been fun, but we had also talked a lot about the different challenges he [...]
some facebook friends are just that–facebook friends. some are people you’re close to emotionally and you keep in touch with videos and pictures and snappy movie quotations. but some facebook friends are with you every day. . .
i see chris treiber every day. he works in winnetka at the community house where i lift [...]
i first opened a facebook account when mark zuckerberg allowed regular folks–i made friends with my two sons joseph and eastman. and then suddenly, the friend requests started coming in. i was popular! which certainly wasn’t the case when i was a teenager. i accepted promiscuously. the guy who worked at the hardware [...]
in every community theater production, there is the fantasy: that the nondescript man in row three will turn out to be a new york producer who has found himself with nothing to do for an evening as he ambles across the country on some business errand. he is enchanted by the plumber’s rendition of henry [...]
. . . and a present for jay from indianapolis.
i have only met lynn nguyen once before, when her family came from pittsburgh to visit her uncle tom and his friend dirk (f2fb #103). she was in eighth grade, self-possessed, gracious, and didn’t seem to mind that i was ancient. although, to be fair, [...]
my biological parents justin and aleta raised me in a typical young married fashion: justin was in school, aleta took some work to pay the bills and they looked forward to a brilliant future.
according to aleta, justin persuaded her that the brilliant future wasn’t going to happen if they kept me and so when [...]

