"And Pooh said to Piglet , 'Life is so much friendlier with two.' "

"It's the friends you can call up at four a. m.," Marlene Dietrich once said, "that matter."

Over the years, I've learned that this is an apt hallmark of a true friend. When the whole world is crashing down around your ears, and it seems like nothing in the universe will ever be all right again, friendship is the Godlike ability to put aside one's own self entirely for a time, all for the good of the loved one. True friends will wake up, disoriented, at your deliriously excited four a. m. phone call and drive ten hours to Georgia with you through the night so you can audition for your dream show, or to Canada so that you can escape your rapidly collapsing world, or to New York City on New Year's because you've always wanted to see Times Square. Conversely, they'll wake up for the weepy four a. m. phone calls, for the inevitable deaths and breakups and crises and toothaches of life.

They will put you on speakerphone during dinnertime as they burn a dozen hamburgers, get up at three o'clock in the morning and feed you chocolate and let you sob on their shoulder after an ugly breakup, take you on mad midnight Wendy's runs when they really ought to be studying metaphysics, and perform great feats of daring just to provide you with your requisite caffeine.

They will pick you up and drop you off from airports and listen to you laugh or weep after life-altering experiences, order you Chinese food and force-feed it to you when you're about to pass out from exhaustion, hunger, hard work, and hypoglycemia, attend your performances multiple times, and plan a cast party for you and pick up your pizzas at great personal inconvenience, and in spite of the fact that they had nothing to do with the show, when you're too frenetically upset to think.

They will let you sleep on their dorm room floor, simply because you can't stand being alone, for an entire semester despite the fact that you snore horribly, graciously allow you write your thesis in their room despite your unfortunate habit of haphazardly strewing Mountain Dew bottles and Twizzler wrappers everywhere, make you soup at midnight if you haven't eaten all day, and drag you to the chapel at moments when you least want to talk to God but most need to.

They will visit you in the hospital, hold you in the middle of the night when the world gets too hard to bear, roll their eyes at your tattoos and piercings, censure you for censurable behavior, and rejoice at your victories, small though they may be.

I have lost countless friends in the last year, but I have been blessed with some truly amazing ones. What price can you put on such a friendship? I've been a horrible human being for the last year, and yet for some inexplicable and deeply baffling reason, there are still people out there who love me, who will always love me, and who want desperately to see me be a good one. I can't quite get my mind around it, but I feel an overwhelming sense of humble gratitude and wonder when I think of the people who have blessed me by their reflection of Divine Love in the life of a girl too fearfully stubborn yet to directly approach the Eternal Love.

In the words of Walt Whitman, "I no doubt deserved my enemies -- but I don't believe I deserve my friends."

To all of these nothing-short-of-incredible people in my life:

I'd like to be the sort of friend you've always been to me
I'd like to be the kind of help you're always glad to be
I'd like to mean as much to you, each minute of the day
As you have meant, old friend of mine, to me along the way. (Edgar A. Guest)