Like Stella

8/11/09

I strutted back into the bar toward Green Shirt Guy. I was confident that I was going to get into a bit of a trouble. But then again, that’s what I was looking for! Now that I had my swagger back, enhanced by the fabulous goods worn underneath my little black sundress, I was on a mission to get my groove back.

Swagger is solely about you - how you feel, what you do to make yourself feel as fabulous as you are, and how you display that confidence to the world. Groove, on the other hand, is about using your swagger to scratch that itch that needs to be scratched, to handle your business, or to get your swerve on. Stella, the original cougar and namesake of getting your groove back, used her tropical escapade to seduce a much younger man and satisfy her needs. She took a page from the IHOP menu. “Come hungry. Leave happy!” As for me, I engaged in a semi-salacious encounter with a slightly younger man (Green Shirt Guy) as a final means of cutting ties with the last guy that I dated. By that point, he was out of my mind and out of my heart, but in the words of my friend, Carmen, I still needed to “get the taste of the last jerk off my lips.” And I did. A little innocent making out on the playground never hurt anyone! Perhaps I was inspired by Hooters tagline to be “delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.”

So what do you do when you haven’t gotten your groove back? First, you need to figure out what it means to you. At any given moment, we are all at different points of need. Maybe you aren’t that hard up and just need to take the Baskin Robbins approach and collect 31 numbers from 31 flavors of men. Just because you can. Or maybe it’s been a little bit longer and what you really need is to take the Burger King approach and “have it your way right away!” No matter what you decide you need, your next step is to enlist your girlfriends and make it a game or a challenge. If there is someone to hold you accountable, you’ll be more likely to go through with it! And who knows, they might need to get their grooves back too! One summer, in college, my roommate’s boyfriend of three years broke up with her. To support her in getting over him, we created a “roommate pact” in which she, and the other three of us, had to commit to making out with a guy at the local club by the end of summer. Apparently, there is safety in numbers, as we all came through, even though it took me 11 drinks and the eleventh hour!

This leads me to my next point. There’s no time like the summer! Whether it is the escalated temperatures or the fact that we are usually reduced to wearing only one article of clothing, there’s something about summer that allows us to shed our inhibitions with our sweaters. Summer is also great for weddings (which fortunately also take place in the other seasons when it is just as easy to lose your groove). They didn’t make that movie Wedding Crashers for nothing! I’m not the only one who has started a story, “This one time, at a wedding…” Jennifer, 31, comments, “If I’m not dating anyone, I don’t take a date to a wedding. It’s the perfect time to meet the groom’s single friends. Even if nothing more comes of it, at least you can have a good time!”

No matter what your situation, you can always find a way to get your groove back with your own Wedding Guy or Green Shirt Guy. Like they say at Dunkin’ Donuts, “You Can Do It!”