img00083Lauren is not even a Formerly yet–she’s a pre-Formerly, but the specter Formerlydom looms large. Here’s all she wrote:

“I recently had cocktails with a business associate. She’s very fun to work with and have a really great energy about her so I always look forward to our meetings. We were at a posh Chicago bar, throwing back Prosecco, half discussing business. I felt good that day: good hair day, fab shoes, a skirt I didn’t have to secretly unbutton when I sat still for more than five minutes.

Well, she and I got on the subject of facials and aging skin, and she revealed her age as 38. I told her I was floored. “You look 28,” I said. She was flattered.

Then she asked my age. I was SOOOOO sure she would be just as floored when hearing my real age–most people guess my age around 27. “Go on, guess,” I teased her.

She looked at me, then paused. “Uhh… 34?” she asked?

WHAT?? WHAT????? I thought. Did she just say thirty-mother-freakin-four??

It was obvious from my expression that I was offended. She started to backtrack “Oh God… is that too old? How old are you??”

I looked at her in disgust. “I’m 33 but I don’t look it AT ALL. Most people guess 27!”

She relaxed. “Oh, so I was a year off. That’s still good…”

Yeah, well, not so much.

That little guess-my-age game first backfired on me and my friend Susan maybe 7 or 8 years ago when we went out to this hipster bistro near me and thought, hey, we fit in pretty well amongst the childless and fabulous! The swarthy young waiter was flirting with us, and naturally we assumed it was because we were so attractive, witty and edgy (and not because he was working to fund his acting career and thought, these women are old enough to earn enough to actually tip me).

“How old are we? Go on, guess!” We prompted him. He, too, guessed correctly, which made us feel like crap because you KNOW he thought we were older and shaved a few years off of his guess to be polite. Susan and I looked at each other and it was one of those moments when the noise and the music and the glass-clinking died down briefly and we heard our own emotions. They sounded like THIS.

Anyway, thank you to Lauren, whose blog about life’s little mortifying moments is lots of fun when you need a hit of that “No, it’s not just you” feeling. Which clearly I need often or I wouldn’t be begging for you ladies to share your Formerly/Finally moments!

Not for nothing, my Finally, now that I’m kind of over it, is “Finally don’t care if they guess my age right because, well, so what?” AND “Finally almost ready to start lying upwards about my age because then everyone will want to know which devil I’ve been dealing with to look this rockin’.”

I’ll let you know how that experiment goes.

Please send me your Formerly/Finally stories for next week!