“Me, neither,” I said. “I use my oven to warm my socks.”

“Really? I use mine to dry my newspapers.”

Clearly Emeril had nothing to fear from us.

“Besides,” I said, squeezing ketchup onto my burger, “I adore Whoppers.”

And that was no lie. I proceeded to dig into mine with gusto. And I was not alone in my gusto-hood. Pam was right alongside me, mouthful for mouthful.

When we finally came up for air, we started gabbing. I told Pam about my life as a writer, and she told me about her life as an actress. And trust me, I had the better deal. I don’t know how actors cope with all the rejection. Would you believe she was once turned down for the part of a corpse because she didn’t look dead enough?

Pam asked me about my love life and, after a hearty chuckle, I explained that it was currently on the endangered species list. I told her about my disastrous marriage to The Blob. That’s what I call my ex-husband. He seemed perfectly divine when I met him. Not a flaw in sight. No hint of the man who would eventually pick his teeth with paper clips and watch ESPN during sex.

She tsk-tsked in sympathy.

“I know just how you feel. My marriage was a fiasco, too.”

“Really? What went wrong?”

“Everything. We fought constantly, bickered, had screaming matches, threw lamps at each other. And that was just on the honeymoon.”

She popped a final fry into her mouth, then checked her watch.

“We’d better get going, or we’ll be late for the meeting. Time to do the dishes!”

She held out a wastepaper basket, and we tossed in our trash.

“Well, that’s done,” she said, wiping her hands on her sweats, clearly a graduate of the Jaine Austen School of Housekeeping, too.

Pam drove her battered Nissan Sentra west on Sunset to Brentwood.

“So tell me more about the club,” I said, as we tooled past the quatrillion-dollar estates on Sunset Boulevard.

“Well, we’ve been meeting for about a year now. Most of us hooked up at the L.A. Racquet Club.”

“The fancy gym on the west side?”

Pam nodded. “I’d just finished shooting my vegetable soup commercial and I was feeling flush. So I sprung for a membership.”

“Isn’t it awfully snooty?”

“Some of the members are, but the PMS gals are really great. We connected right away.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Let’s see. There’s Rochelle. She hosts the meetings every week.”

“Every week? Doesn’t she mind?”

“Hell, no. She insists on it. She loves to play hostess. I think she’s memorized every book Martha Stewart ever wrote. The woman cooks everything from scratch. If she could make her own water, she would. She puts cocktail umbrellas in her margaritas and little Mexican flags in her homemade empanadas.”

“Little Mexican flags?”