She was raised in a New England village

When I envisioned this blog, I thought about things I might include in it. One of the things that seemed most obvious in my earliest thoughts was a recurring series about the awesome people in my life. Trust me when I tell you, while there are only a few people I hold close these days, they are a truly remarkable group.

So, I kick this series off with exclamations of praise about my friend Bethany Kent.


Beth and I have known each other since we were about 12, but we knew each other for years before we really became friends. We went to different elementary schools and while I would say we met in junior high, we were only friendly due to mutual acquaintances. In high school, we seemed to always have math class and gym together. Despite not being particularly close even then, we somehow found ourselves in plenty of strange and goofy situations together. It was Beth who came up with the idea that, before we graduated, we needed to get our hands on some sweatshirts from our soon to be alma mater, an idea which led to an extremely alarmed Beth (maybe the self proclaimed worst phys ed student of all time—another reason she’s my soul sister) informing me that she’d been called to the athletic office, and wondering what it could possibly mean (that our sweatshirts had come in to the athletic director, it turned out, after we walked slowly and with terror to his office, visions of threats that we wouldn’t graduate if we didn’t run the mile or something running through both of our minds).

Here is a list of the top ten reasons that my BFF Bethany is so awesome, in no particular order:

1. She is the funniest person I have ever known in real life. This cannot be overstated, and in fact, if it didn’t seem like a huge cop-out in making this list, I would make it at least the first two points, if not more. She is forever coming up with hilarious one-liners, she is completely willing to be the butt of the joke, and she can make a perfect, situation-fittingly genius pop culture reference with the best of them.


2. She once spent a week’s worth of late nights with me, in my (single) dorm room, staying up until 4 am sometimes, watching 2 entire seasons of Gilmore Girls. Between classes and other responsibilities. So we could start the last season totally caught up, of course (neither of us having ever actually watched the show as it aired). Please note: Beth went to college in Boston, and I was in Kingston, RI. So, it’s not like it was already a crazy feat, but maybe even more impressive with that minor detail.


3. Beth is the friend I can make super lame pop culture references to, without fearing she will make fun of me. My friends are all awesome but she is a safe harbor when it comes to admitting to being super into really embarrassing things. I will leave out a list of said embarrassing things.


4. She’s a fat kid. If you’re one, too, you know how important it is to have fat kid friends.


5. We were once at a local eatery called Fat Jacks (and by “local,” I mean, it was a good 20-minute drive from where we both used to live), a place URI kids would go to when the bars in Galilee closed down at the end of the night, to eat greasy food and sober up. On this particular night, a guy sitting at one of the booths spoke up to the whole place, asking for every person in the place who was drunk to raise their hands. The whole place did. Then he asked for everyone who was old enough to legally drink to please put their hands down, and the only hands remaining raised were those of every female in the place. The guy laughed, and one girl (a particularly serious and studious girl I knew from political science classes, whose name I have forgotten) started jeering. “Well you’re just livin’ ther dream, aren’t you?” she called out to him, sort of weirdly threateningly. “Livin’ the dream. LTD.” She repeated her new phrase a few times. Beth finally turned from facing her to look back at me. “That’s our new catch phrase,” she declared. “And if we ever—God forbid—get into enough of a fight that we stop speaking, if you call me and say ‘LTD,’ I will forgive whatever it was and start speaking to you again.”
   5a. We weren’t drunk. We hadn’t even been out to the bars. We were both maybe 22 years old.
   5b. We were there for the cheese fries.


6. She is the kind of friend you can count on to be there for you, even if you don’t ask for anything. She once took me out to dinner and a movie when a guy blew me off for a date, and made sure it was the girliest rom com out at the time, theorizing that there was a good chance we wouldn’t see a guy in the entire theater (for the record: the seminal Katherine Heigl classic, 27 Dresses). Or, she came home to RI the weekend after I got out of the hospital this past summer. She used one of her few vacation days so she could come and sit in my apartment and watch my baby (something she admitted later was a completely foreign task to her), because she’s just a great friend.


7. This one is a little less easy to define as a specific quality, but is pretty important. While here the previously mentioned weekend, she and I were discussing my husband, Kurt, and how much I love knowing that he loves my friends, and that they love him. “Yesterday,” Beth said, “at one point, all four of us were in your bed together. You, me, Kurt and Liam. And I just thought…is this weird? …This is not weird.” She didn’t explain it further, because she didn’t need to. She’s just a member of our family.


8. While in town for Christmas this year, she told me she’d sent Liam a Christmas present that would be coming in the mail in a few days. “I’m not going to tell you what it is,” she said. “But it rhymes…with…slammies.”


9. Beth went to Emerson College and studied PR. When she graduated, she was a street teamer for a radio station in Southern New England called Hot 106. She applied for a bunch of jobs in New York City and I think nearly got a bunch of them, but was ultimately always passed over because she didn’t have any experience managing people. When the promotions guy for that station left for a different job, she applied for the job and took it over. She worked in that position for years before the company she worked for was sold and her boss left for a different station in a different state. She put up with the new job in the new company for a while, then got a way better, way higher paying job in Philly. She went from something like the 47the market in the country to the 18^th. And then, she had a job created for her in New York. It only took 7 years and change, and she got herself a job with either the secon, or possibly first market in the United States, which was created for her, in the city she was told she didn’t have enough experience for. That’s my best friend, people. Give her a challenge and she will meet it head on. And she will win. And she won’t even be a dick about it. She’s just that cool.


10. She used to have a golden retriever named Kiwi (RIP), and she would do things like insert Kiwi’s name into every song she could think of (most notably, “Kiwis only,” to the tune of the pivotal R Kelly hit “Playas Only,” featuring The Game), or dress her up in a hot pink doggy jacket, complete with a faux-fur lined hood, to go outside on a snowy day. Kiwi was the best and every one of Beth’s friends knows it.

Bonus! 11: She was maid of honor in my wedding. This may not sound like a huge feat, but let me add that this meant that she stayed up for something like 36 hours working on a concert for the station, then picked up my flowers and my dress and drove to New York where she argued with my mother to keep the ceremony outside when a thunderstorm was threatening to cancel the whole thing, danced with the rest of the bridesmaids while rapping along with mo’ money mo’ problems, and jumped in the pool at the end of the reception before anybody else would—fully clothed. And then she continued to speak to me after doing all of that! Amazing.

I know you’re jealous.

I write about this to give some overdue thanks to my BFF, Miz Bethany Kent, because I owe her about a million favors, visits, smiles and probably concert tickets from back in our show frequenting college days (I do remember her once buying  our tickets to a show,  assuring me, so I wouldn’t feel guilty, that they were going to count as my Christmas and birthday presents, as well as any future wedding or baby shower gifts…and she has since shown up, present in hand, to any and all of these events, because she is generous and awesome). Just to put it out into the world that she is a friend of the highest order and that anybody else who is lucky enough to call her a pal should turn to her right now (or email, call, text or tweet her) and let her know how special a person she is. I would pay her back for any of the things she has done for me in a second, the only problem being that they pile up so quickly because she is such a giving and wonderful person. Just knowing I have someone to text excitedly when I find out that the next season of The Kardashians is starting in a few weeks and she will not only not judge or make fun of me, but will respond in kind, is the greatest gift.

So, here’s to you, BK!