Mark KennedyView other columns by Mark Kennedy
Back in the early 1980s, they were a group of young Chattanooga mothers bound by their love for tennis.
Today, they are girlfriends with 35 years of stories, their lives intertwined like strands in a necklace.
Now grandmothers, they travel together under the banner "The Antiques Road Show." Literally. They have a banner that they unfurl on the porches of their rental houses or condos that borrows the name from the popular PBS television series. It gets laughs everywhere they go. And that's the point of this sisterhood - to celebrate pure, undiluted, nonjudgmental fun.
"When we get together we laugh for four days solid," says Jean McKamey, a member of the group and its unofficial travel planner.
Once, the women took over a piano bar in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., and charmed the crowd with a rowdy country song. Last year, they commandeered one of those multi-seat beer bikes in downtown Nashville during a rainstorm and laughed themselves to exhaustion.
Their motto is: "I Love the Nights I Can't Remember, with Friends I Can't Forget."
As you read this, the six friends are in St. Simons Island, Ga., reprising their yearly summer vacations - a traveling tribe of women impervious to deaths, divorce, sickness, relocation and time. Not once in 35 years did the friends, as a group, decide to pass on their yearly trip.
In the beginning, back in 1981, the trips were ostensibly tennis outings for the women of the Racquet Club of Chattanooga in Hixson. Over time, the trips became less athletic and more social, and now the friends don't even bother to pack their tennis rackets. At this point in their lives, they are more about porch swings than backswings.
"The rackets take up too much space," says Carol Collins, a member of the group.
At one time or another, 12
women have called themselves part of the group. Two are deceased. Others moved away. The same six have been together for the last 25 years. Besides Collins and McKamey, the group includes Kathy Showe, Judy Knight, Lorna Mura and Marty Medley.
Some of their favorite destinations are Amelia Island, Fla.; St. Simons, Ga.; St. Augustine, Fla.; and Fredericksburg, Va. They've visited wine country in Austin, Texas, and sampled maple syrup in small-town Vermont.
Typically, they travel together in a van, maximizing the time they have to tell stories and giggle like schoolgirls. There's even talk of hiring a driver. One imagines "Driving Miss Daisy" times six.
One year, they all bought T-shirts emblazoned with flamingos, just for laughs. Last year in Nashville, they stayed in an apartment in Printer's Alley and rode a mechanical bull in a nightclub.
If there's a design to their hijinks, it's to create instant stories - stories that will go down easy five years from now with a glass of wine and a coastal breeze.
Come to think of it, that's probably what they're doing right now. Sitting on the wrap-around porch on their rental house in St. Simons and reading this article on somebody's iPhone.
The big porch was the big reason for choosing this year's abode.
As McKamey says, "Just imagine the stories it will hear."
Just imagine.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.