Carrie Link

SEX AND THE CITY

Three friends and I are going to see "Sex and the City" tonight. We've waited long enough. It opened two days ago, for God's sake. But we've waited much longer than that. We've waited all these years since the season finale, which we watched all together while drinking champagne and going through a box of tissues.

Two of us went in together and bought the entire series on DVD several years back. As each of us convalesced from various surgeries or illnesses, we passed the series around to make the time go faster, funnier, sexier.

The four of us met 9 years ago when we all had daughters in kindergarten together. Now our four girls are graduating from 8th grade in a week, going to three different high schools, spreading out and moving on. Not us. We'll still be here, together, in our neighborhood, holding each other up during the hard times, making each other laugh, and sharing our most personal stories with each other as only women with much history together can do.

"Friends and the City," may have been a more accurate title to the series, if you ask me. Sure, there was plenty of sex, but that's not what I remember after all is said and done. I remember the universality of the women's bond. Their way of laughing and being together. Their way of cutting right through the BS when someone was obviously hiding something. Their way of supporting each other despite their conflicting needs and situations.

Friendship.

That's what I remember.

That's what we'll be raising our Cosmopolitans to, and toasting tonight after the movie.

Friendship.