FIVE, GIANT ZITS!

“Are you calling to tell me you’re running late?”  I answered the phone in my car quite happily because I myself was then officially 30 minutes behind schedule. 

“Yes, the stupid dermatologist was running late and now I have to go home and put foundation all over the zits on my face that he injected with cortisone.”

My foot fell off the brake and I almost rolled into the car in front of me.

“Wwwwhat did you just say?”

“I have FIVE, HUGE ZITS on my face that won’t go away so my doctor injected them with cortisone.”

“That’s ridiculous.  It can’t be that bad, Heidi.”

As featured on my blog before, Heidi is my best friend from college.  The one that somehow brings athleticism, kindness, humor, a genuine love of nature, a no bull-shit approach to life, and fierce loyalty to the table.

“It's horrible!” She was laughing as she attempted to defend her highly aggressive course of zit treatment.  “I have had a couple of these zits for like two weeks.”

I won’t lie.  I wasn’t completely unhappy to hear Heidi say that she had FIVE allegedly GIANT ZITS on her face that wouldn’t go away, to the point that her dermatologist agreed to inject cortisone shots into each of them, one by one, in an effort to shrink them down.  

I have to go home to put foundation on the zits. 

Her words replayed in my head as I felt a smile stretch further and further across my face. 

Is Heidi really going to meet me for brunch today with a complexion that resembles some sort of patch-work quilt?  Can she really look that bad?  After more than 20 years of friendship, has this day finally come?

I realize I sound like a pretty big asshole.  I mean, she is my best friend from college.  We have a huge history together: fraternity parties, roommates, dating, break-ups, first jobs, engagements, careers, weddings, pregnancies, babies, family vacations...that one time in college when a mutual friend of ours said to me:

“Liz, I don’t know how you can hang out with Heidi as much as you do.  I mean she’s beautiful.  She’s perfect: that smile, those legs.  I think every guy on this campus would do anything to go out with her.  I mean, don’t you feel kinda inadequate?”

Or something like that, I mean who can remember exactly what happened almost twenty years ago… in the beer bar in the Student Union on May 7, 1993 around 6 p.m. when you were ditching your Shakespeare class for the second time in two weeks?

“How bad can it be?”  I asked Heidi, trying my best to sound concerned versus gleeful.

“Dude, it’s baaaad…alright, I’ll hurry,” she paused.  "I can’t believe we haven’t seen each other since New Year’s Eve!”    

“I know!  Alright, drive safe.  See you when I see you.”

And we were off.  She from Orange County and me from Ventura County for our mid-way-ish, Los Angeles County rendezvous for brunch, pedicures, AND CATCHING UP!

And catch up we did, and laugh and lament, and ponder and plan, and royally stuff ourselves with pasta and warm crepes stuffed with pears, and, of course, the requisite, celebratory glass of Prosecco.  

And try as I might have, I only saw ONE of the FIVE, GIANT ZITS which wasn’t even GIANT. 

Alas, Heidi remains beautiful inside and out (though I did notice the pedicurist break a sweat in her attempt to buff away the two, rather unsightly calluses Heidi has on the tops of her fourth and fifth toes…ON BOTH FEET!)   

Oh, look! There she is now...looking ugly, doing ugly things!