Can six terminally attractive and hormonally healthy young people live together in peace, harmony and (most challenging) chastity?
They can on TV, on a sitcom titled “Friends” that premiered last fall on NBC. Nobody (including its stars) figured the show would take off quite the way it did. By summer, it routinely wound up in first place in the weekly ratings.
But cynics are quick to contend that the show’s premise is so far-fetched as to be unbelievable: Two great-looking female roommates and one of their girlfriends become friends with the two great-looking male roommates from across the hall and their friend (who’s the brother of one of the girl roommates). They’re all just friends. Period. Fantasies, maybe, but no funky monkey–though the new season, which begins Thursday, holds some promise.
Far-fetched?
Not for one group of young Chicagoans who found themselves living the “Friends” lifestyle–for real.
Matt, Rish, Mike and Jason were high school pals who stayed in touch after they left Benet Academy in Lisle and headed for different colleges. Four years later, when they all got jobs, they decided to get an apartment together. Mike’s friend Vinnie from Boston College joined them.
They found a four-bedroom apartment in the DePaul neighborhood. It was functional, not very fancy, and so what if one of the bedrooms was technically a closet and the hallway banisters were falling down and the front door of the building didn’t exactly lock all the time? If this were a sitcom, they’d be story lines.
And besides, says Mike, “I was used to living with a bunch of guys in a rathole, so this didn’t seem all that bad.”
A month later, Michelle and Amy came to Chicago from Michigan to look for an apartment. But first they looked up Rish, their pal from Miami of Ohio, and wound up partying the weekend away. He mentioned that an apartment in the building was available, but they were sure they could do better.
They couldn’t. Three weeks later, with sorority sisters Lisa and Jackie, they signed a lease and became “the girls downstairs.”
Since then, the nine 22- and 23-year-olds have become not only friends, but unquestionably a family. And even though the upstairs-downstairs arrangement recently became a down-the-block situation, the family ties remain tight.
They rely on each other and support each other. They finish one another’s sentences, laugh at their inside jokes and, though they’re loath to say it, it’s pretty obvious they love each other. In the year they’ve been real-life friends, they say there hasn’t been a single serious problem among members of the group.
Ask them if “Friends” is realistic, and they say mostly–except maybe for the decorating. The apartments on the show are funky, stylish, interestingly furnished and realistically out of reach for the average financially challenged college grad.
The real-life apartments are furnished with pieces that have obviously spent some less-than-quality time in basements and garages. Upstairs in the DePaul building, three couches (affectionately named Foam Guy, Green Guy and Leather Guy) were crammed so close together in a “U” that there was no room between them and the square coffee table they surrounded. Housecleaning for the men was as simple as sweeping the coffee table.
Like the characters on the TV show, each of these friends has little quirks that writers could turn into episode twists: Mike is the curious one, Rish is “Mr. Personality,” Michelle isn’t great with finances, Jason works long hours, Jackie’s the one whose clothes are borrowed by everybody else, Amy is always upbeat, Matt’s a great storyteller, Lisa is the most responsible and Vinnie has the out-of-town girlfriend.
Ah, love raises its inevitable head. So how realistic is the show’s “just friends, no funny business” theme?
Well, OK–maybe not very.
Lisa and Mike dated for the first few months after she moved in and were relieved when their breakup didn’t make them or the others uncomfortable. (“We saw each other every day,” Lisa says. “It was fine.”) And Matt and Michelle became an item a few months ago.
According to her, “It happened gradually, which is a good thing. And now, when we go to their apartment to watch TV or something, I’m with Matt, but I’m with them, too,” she says, nodding to the group. “I have the best of both worlds.”
A tough circle to break into
Time with the group is jealously guarded–even against actual dates. Like the gang on “Friends,” these pals spend a lot of time together. Most of them are home from work by 5:30 p.m. and wind up together in one of the apartments. When weekends approach, neither group asks the other what they’re doing, but rather “what we’re doing.”
And they all agree that an outsider has to have real potential to be more appealing than spending Friday and Saturday night with the whole group. According to Amy, “When a guy calls for a date, you always hope he’s asking for Wednesday or Thursday and not a weekend, because you don’t want to miss anything.”
Passing muster with somebody’s father is nothing compared with the gantlet guys can expect to run when they show up for a date with one of these women. One time Amy forgot to mention she had a date, but the guys upstairs figured it out and managed to make separate trips downstairs to look the guy over.
Like an episode of “Friends” in which everybody hated Phoebe’s relentlessly annoying psychologist boyfriend, Amy’s date didn’t make the cut. To nods of approval from the rest of the group, Matt recalls that the guy turned out to be a real jerk.
“If they don’t like someone, there’s probably a good reason,” says Lisa. “We absolutely pay attention to what they think.”
Does date approval work both ways?
Laughter all around, followed by a resounding “No way!” from the guys. In truth, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of outside dating, because there doesn’t seem to be much need.
When this summer’s heat wave hit, the women simply packed up their pillows and spent the night at the men’s air-conditioned apartment. The sleeping arrangements?
“Pot luck,” volunteers one, to laughter from the others.
“We just migrate to the couches, or . . .”
Sleeping together without sex?
“Oh, yeah.”
“Sure. It’s not a problem.”
Separate ways
The only really big problem the group has had to face: moving. When their lease on the upstairs apartment ran out this summer, the guys reluctantly decided to move. The group decided they’d stay close by, and they landed in a much nicer apartment just a block away.
The women didn’t have a real grasp on just how grungy the upstairs apartment had become until they helped with the move.
The women tick off the gory details with relish: Piles of dishes (even though the men never cooked or used the kitchen except to unpack delivered meals), dead pizza, glasses and plates that could only be thrown away because of the mold and gum and Tootsie Pops stuck to them.
The move was marked with a group party (with outside friends also invited) on the street in front of the apartment. To the occasional accompaniment of laughter and tears, the girls read a poem they had written for the guys, and extra food wound up in the hands of street people who happened by.
The two groups still spend most of their time together at one of the apartments, but the geographical separation will be short-lived.
When the downstairs lease expires next month, three of the girls are moving, too–to an apartment with a deck that looks directly out on the guys’ apartment deck.
Who won’t be making the move? Lisa, who is eager to take the exam to become a certified public accountant, has decided that as long as she’s living with the group, she’ll never have the discipline (or peace and quiet) to put in the amount of time she needs to study. The decision to leave, she says with obvious sadness, “is killing me.”
Somewhere down the road, there will be wives and husbands, babies and mortgages and other addresses, and sweet memories of a time in Chicago when their best friends were only a few steps away.
“Friends” cast member David Schwimmer, in a recent interview for Rolling Stone, said one of the reasons the show has been so popular was that “it is a fantasy for a lot of people, having a group of friends who replace the family.”
For this group of Chicago friends, the fantasy is their reality.
As Lisa puts it, looking around at her friends, “Nobody here ever has to be alone.”
