I couldn’t wait for my friend to leave. She had been with me so many years, tagging along on vacations, showing up in my life at inopportune moments and generally making her presence felt in my life whenever she had cause to arrive. And now that she’s gone, I wonder, is this for good? I kinda miss her. She made me feel like a woman, a producer, a female force of nature. We used to refer to her as “the Curse”…back

As much as we all would like, sometimes being a "friend in deed" physically isn't something we're able to do. Recently a good friend of mine had been going through quite a rough patch in her life; it was and no doubt will continue to be filled with not-so-great days for many weeks to come. First the company she worked for went belly up, leaving her with only her private clients in the world of bookkeeping to keep

Isolation from others is detrimental human health—a fact proven in study after study. In one study, researchers found that individuals who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. Another study showed those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%. For women, the famed Nurses’ Health Study from Harvard Medical School found the more friends a woman had, the less likely she was to develop physical

I was a desperate housewife. Except for the hanky-panky, of course. I was a stay-at-home mom for 13 years. My husband would jokingly say I was in “Adult Conversation Deprivation.” I was not laughing. That is, until a hilarious conversation I had with my best friend, Lisa. Lisa told me of her experience joining the “Red Hat Society.” She was invited by another woman to attend her first meeting at a restaurant. Adorned in her new pink hat, (you must be 50 years