It’s Cheap Cabernet Time!

First things first:  Did you know that we give away the first two chapters of “Cheap Cabernet” for free? It’s a thank you for signing up for the Cheap Cab newsletter.

They’re good chapters <wicked grin>: Tommy Lee Jones’s Ass and Wanted: Women. Simply sign up for the Cheap Cab Newsletter and you’ll get an email with a link to the Free Downloads.

Second: Pop on over to www.facebook.com/cheapcabernet and “Like” us! We routinely give away free autographed books, free Signature Cheap Cabernet Vino — and a whole slew of stuff that’s worth a couple of clicks any day!

Also, like The Last Lecture and The Middle Place, Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship is nominated for the 2011 Books for a Better Life Award — THANK YOU, Universe!

It is such a sweet, sweet time for friendships everywhere.

Have you ever had one of those meteoric, soul-changing, life-altering friendships? I’m talking about one of those friendships where you can’t even remember what your life was like before you were friends?

I suspect you have. I know I did.

In the mid 1990s, I invented a women’s group. I ran a $1.75 ad in the Boulder, Colorado newspaper:

WOW (Women on the Way)—
to an insane asylum, a bar, wherever.
Smart, sassy women’s group forming.
Mutual support, networking, etc. Weds.
7 p.m. 239-4666.

The response to the ad was mind-blowing, to say the least. Dozens of women called — the young, the old, the stoned and the ill — one woman called from a hospital bed. I am not kidding.

I was looking for eight women to meet every Wednesday night for support, networking, fun — whatever.

One of the women, Denise, showed up and the rest, as they say, is some wild-a__ history.

Though I initially thought Denise and I total opposites — and the truth is that I didn’t really like her at first — we became (pretty much overnight) the cliche, joined-at-the-hip best friends.

That would be BFF in 21st Century parlance.

From this life-altering friendship, came the memoir, “Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship.”

Women friendships — those powerful, cosmic friendships we all have — is the muse and the fuel behind the book.

Perhaps Iris Rainer Dart’s (author of “Beaches”) reaction to “Cheap Cabernet” sums it up best:

Cathie Beck’s wonderfully told and achingly poignant memoir will remind every woman to call her best friend right away to tell her how important their relationship is, and how she couldn’t survive without it And, by the way, to run out and buy the heartbreaking book, “Cheap Cabernet.”