Principessa Valve

Sometimes you just gotta let it out.

Like the other night, a friend was telling me that she'd watched "The Impossible" and cried her eyes out during it.

I questioned why she'd even watched the movie, since I knew after merely seeing its preview, that it would have destroyed me.

Personally, I need movies for a lot of reasons, but that's not one of them.

Her response was that sometimes she liked to have an excuse to let it all out, so to speak, to cry for the sake of crying.

She likened it to a release valve and then I got it.

Tonight was like that for me without the wetness.

I had a lot on my mind and I needed a release for it.

So I called up a girlfriend and asked if we could get together and blather so I could let my valve off.

Naturally we couldn't jump right into that heaviness, so we started in the Devil's Triangle at Ariana's for pizza and wine.

My last trip to Ariana's had been Fall 2009 after Holmes and I had gone to the Historical Society to see the Declaration of Independence.

We'd sat at a corner table and watched a thunderstorm roll in over the rooftops and catch people unprepared.

Tonight we had a gentle rain just beginning.

With a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, a Mediterranean salad and a Principessa (sausage, spinach, mushroom) white pizza, we started by focusing more on food and drink than life and woe.

As a devotee of white pizza, I loved how the menu said that if you wanted to switch a white pizza to red, there was a $2 surcharge.

That's right, penalize the red lovers instead of us for a change.

As puddles formed outside, we talked about art in all kinds of ways - a show I'd regretfully missed at the National Gallery, a stolen Renoir that's now been found in the collection of a Maryland woman, an article we'd both seen about visiting Paris to focus solely on food, not art.

But you can only delay the inevitable for so long, so once our meal was over, we headed back to her apartment for valve release.

That required another bottle, this time an Alsatian white, to accompany the abundance of conversation.

Everyone needs a friend who'll listen when you need to rant, someone who'll nod when you ask, "Right?" and support you when you're down.

She was that and more and when she brought me home, I thanked her profusely for being a much-needed ear tonight.

Like the friend who'd sobbed through a sad movie, I felt so much better for having let off a little steam.

And it didn't even take that long, a good thing because all that wine was suddenly making my bed the priority.

When I woke up a few hours later, it was because I heard thunder, meaning my visit to Ariana's had once again conjured up a storm.

Or maybe I wasn't the only one that needed a release tonight.