When Your Friend's Daughter Is Your Daughter's Friend

Also, a story about a pancake.

Photo of The Daughters by Jack Mackay

My last in a long series of last goodbyes before I move to Asheville didn’t happen. I had invited my dear friend Lisa, whose daughter Madeleine has been friends with my daughter Kat since preschool, over for a Christmas Eve breakfast featuring The Big Pancake. Alas, a COVID exposure kept us apart.

Since Lisa and Madeleine have been in my life longer than The Big Pancake, I’ll start with them. Lisa and my ex-husband were friends in film school. In fact, had my ex not been the cinematographer on Lisa’s USC student film, which resulted in a wrap party where I met him, I would not have either of my children, if you’re following. (Side note: Lisa and her husband Doug are hugely talented documentary filmmakers, and if you want to know more about them, here you go).

Lisa and I didn’t become close until after my divorce. We’d been out of touch for years until we bumped into each other in the sandbox, of all places, at a back-to-school picnic for our daughters’ preschool. As the girls became fast friends — their bond was forged when they swiped a scissors and styled each other’s locks under the crafts table — so did we.

One benefit of your children’s playdates is that you get to have grown-up playdates at the same time, assuming you like their friends’ parents. The girls had their sleepovers, Lisa and I had our coffee klatches, and a 17-year friendship ensued. Lisa doesn’t have a lot of extended family, and mine was far away, so a more apt descriptor of our affiliation is “famship.” We are the kind of friends that become family.

Somewhere buried in a box that is just one of many boxes of old photos is my favorite picture of Lisa and me. I don’t have the energy to search for it, but I can tell you what I remember. It was taken at one of Kat’s birthday parties. At least, I’m pretty sure it was Kat’s party but it could have been some other kid’s party because so many parties occurred at the same venue. In this photo that I really need to find and frame, Lisa and I are smiling in the sun and standing with our arms around each other. With her free hand, Lisa is holding a red hula hoop, a symbol of childhood ebullience if ever there was one; reflecting on that circular tube, and that day, is like taking a hit off a wonder-filled bong that beckons me into euphoric recall. I was in my 40s then and I remember worrying that I looked old, but the last time I saw that photo of Lisa and me, I thought, boy, were we young.

Anyway, in lieu of that photo, here is a pictorial of our famship.

Two adorable but completely untrustworthy preschoolers. Can you spot the uneven bangs on the shifty-eyed one?

Kat’s 6th birthday party. I (the lady in white wings) wrote a play that involved fairies (Kat, top left; Madeleine, bottom left) thwarting a villain (Lisa) who tried to steal their treasure until she was felled by fairy dust. The production had a very limited run.

Studying up on Central Coast news while awaiting crepes in Pismo Beach

Larchmont Village, Los Angeles

Jeni’s Ice Cream, Los Feliz

Pismo Beach, again

Kat, clearly explaining something of great significance to Lisa and Madeleine

Socially distanced college send-off. We were toasting Lisa and Madeleine, seated across the lawn from us:

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When Kat was little, she told me that Lisa was her favorite friend of mine because “you laugh more with her than with anyone else.” Lisa is one of the funniest people I know. Like laugh till you cry funny. Like if you’re drinking coffee while she’s on a roll, it may come out your nose funny. Her humor is sort of Borscht Belt meets erudite wordplay meets irreverence meets an uncanny ability to spot what’s absurd, and riff on it, in moments that others overlook.

She is also the kind of friend that, if you tell her with very little advance notice and no run-through that you need her to play the villain in a skit at your kid’s birthday party, she’ll say sure, but only if I get top billing.

Lisa made me laugh during years when an acrimonious divorce left little room for levity (except when she was around) and she makes me laugh now when, to quote the late witticist Nora Ephron, “divorce is no longer the most interesting about me” and life feels invigorating again.

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Divorce takes many things from you, but it also gives you experiences you wouldn’t have had if you’d stayed married — such as the opportunity to start new traditions with your children. One of these traditions began in March 2007 when I stumbled upon food writer Amanda Hesser’s updated NYT recipe for David Eyre’s Pancake. This dutch baby iteration is so sublime that chef David Eyre supposedly requested it on his deathbed for his final meal and now that I think about it, I’d like to put in an advance order.

Recently, Kat used the yellowed, wrinkled NYT recipe that lives on the side of our refrigerator as inspiration for a visual poetry assignment. She didn’t take a photo of her project, and I still don’t understand what a visual poem is even though she’s explained it twice, but all this is to say that one should should approach The Big Pancake with reverence, along with an appetite.

All through their childhood, my kids demanded requested the delicacy for breakfast on the weekends they were with me. I can’t remember which one of them dubbed this symphony of butter, milk, flour, confectioner’s sugar, nutmeg, and lemon The Big Pancake, but that’s what it came to be called. For years, I whipped it up every other weekend and it was promptly inhaled by any kids who appeared at our breakfast table, including Madeleine.

So it seemed fitting that on my last weekend with Kat in the city of her childhood, and my last weekend with friends in the city of my young and middle adulthood, I would serve The Big Pancake. At least, that was the plan until an unlikely but still possible transmission from a COVID exposure made us call off the gathering.

But not The Big Pancake. Kat and I devoured it on Christmas morning and FaceTimed Lisa and Madeleine mid-bite. If they ever want to taste it again, they’ll have to come to Asheville.