I am about to be 37 in a week and I’ve never had any kind of “girls’ night” either out or in. I have no idea what goes on at such things.
However, I have a number of female friends and recently I’ve felt this weird need to have an all-girl sort of bonding evening, but I don’t have the slightest clue how to go about it. Mainly because… I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY DO! Bake something and then watch a bunch of movies with Meg Ryan in them or something???
I mean, I spent the week using a plasma cutter, a MIG welder, and an angle grinder… watched several TiVo’d sci-fi shows… took a bunch of nerdy videos of my cats… and went to class.
I showered, brushed my hair and teeth… but I didn’t do anything girly like “do” my hair or put on makeup… in fact for a few of those days I wore the same clothes because they were the ones I didn’t mind getting burn holes in them from the aforementioned welding/cutting/grinding.
It’s not that I’m unfeminine… it’s that I’ve mostly either been a lone wolf, an internet buddy, or had male friends.
So gals, help me out! If I were to invite a buncha ladies over (any of you female dopers in the Cleveland area are welcome to come!) what the heck would we DO? What kind of crap could I plan to entice people to such a thing? I mean on Gidget I think they’d put curlers in their hair and paint each others’ toenails after having a massive pillow fight, but that doesn’t sound that fun…
(I should note that this would be at my house, not a “girls’ night OUT” because you’re sharing it with a bunch of strangers and also such things add up price-wise really fast and we’re trying to plan a wedding among other expenses. Booze we have. Bar-priced booze, not so much.)
Hey, you and I used to do girls’ nights all the time… get dressed up and go out to the goth club and ogle cute guys. Remember the good ol’ days?
But maybe that doesn’t count because there were guys there.
You know me, I don’t have any female friends either, since you moved away. I would imagine having some wine/drinks, eating some food, and maybe watching a movie, or chit-chatting?
My friends and I like picking a theme and watching movies within it. Like, we had 80’s movie night, 90’s movie night, Shia LaBeouf movie night, and we plan on having a drag movie night and hockey movie night when everybody’s home. Buy or make food that everyone likes, watch movies, be silly, etc. We’re also fond of putting on makeup and dressing up and taking lots of pictures, but that’s just us.
But really, I don’t think there’s a single “Girls’ Night List of Approved Activities”. Get together and do something you all enjoy doing, it doesn’t have to be whatever cliche you’ve got in mind. Meg Ryan has never been involved in our Girls’ Nights.
Razorette and her friends start with drinks and dinner at a dumpy little place downtown, then usually go to a chick-flick where they eat buttered popcorn (she thinks I don’t know) and whisper and giggle like junior high school girls, then hit Village Inn for carrot cake and herbal tea until about midnight. 'Course, these ladies are all in their mid-50s and married, but she seems to enjoy it.
If it is a girl’s night where we are staying in the apartment we will order pizza/chinese/whatever and bake brownies and play board games or karaoke or something. There is never nail painting or hair styling because, well, if we wanted to do that we could do it on our own, really. As long as there is chocolate and talk of the boys that is all that matters, though I will admit if there are drunken hijinks the digital camera must come out at some point (curse that picture of me covered in face paint and asleep on my friend’s sofa!)
Well, I used to have girls’ nights with a friend that involved watching tivo’d Ice Road Truckers and cooking something perhaps a bit extravagant. (The duck was good.)
I think the core components are: girls, some kind of entertainment that you can partake of without being upset if it gets talked over, some sort of indulgent food and beverage. Alcohol strictly optional, but sometimes fun.
You’re right to think that girls’ nights out can get expensive. Nice once in a while but…
I like the pajama party style of girls’ night in, because hey, slouchy clothes… pillows and blankies. Comfortable.
On our “Girl’s Night Out” we usually eat something and see a movie. Sometimes we go out for ice cream and a movie…sometimes we do a fondue night and a movie in, like the three-hour Pride and Prejudice! Sometimes we play Bunco, and eat. Food is very important. When I was younger, we did it during the day when the kids were in school, going out for lunch and then shopping in all the stores that we would never take our husbands or kids to. Basically we do the things we like to do that men and kids don’t have the patience for. Sometimes we sit around and do puzzles, or knit, and watch a movie.
In the past we’d go to the club (rarely), the pub (more often). Last time we did girl’s night out we went for Vietnamese and hit the casino for a couple hours to lose twenty bucks.
It’s whatever you make of it really. Like Idlewild said, the core components are girls, entertainment of some sort (whatever the group prefers) and food and drink (not necessarily alcoholic) of some variety.
No that didn’t count because at least for me that was just best friends going out together. I mean those “buncha girls together” kinds of things that shows like “Friends” lead you to believe happen in real life…
In my circles, girls’ nights were about not having the guys around. Mostly they started when we were younger, and more worried about impressing the guys. Girls’ night was about no makeup, wearing that old ratty but comfortable sweatshirt, burping contests, oogling Jason Statham and wondering, out loud, how he is in bed.
Depends on what you all like, I guess. I had a large circle of female friends in Egypt who would go get their nails done together and stuff like that … sometimes I was invited out of politeness but they usually didn’t bother because they knew I wouldn’t do it.
We did do a large-scale “girl’s weekend out” where about 6 of us spent the weekend in a luxury hotel suite. Pretty much all we did was:
I have a girls night every three months or so with my two best girlfriend and our gay houseboy (we call him that, it’s not some kind of homophobic slam - yes he’s gay). Mostly we talk about what has been going on in our lives because we leave each other alone to go about said lives when we are not hanging out. We drink. ALOT. Because we don’t get to in our lives as mothers, aunts, artists, students, whatever we’ve got going on. We support each other unconditionally and let each other confess stuff we wouldn’t anywhere else (“you know I felt jealous of Paris Hilton the other day”).
