DAUGHTERS REAFFIRM BOND WITH SPECIAL WOMEN; GROUP OF ALEMANY ALUMNAE SALUTES MOMS.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

Lonnie Perez felt the last 25 years slowly melt away as she looked across the restaurant table at her daughter laughing over another woe-filled tale of lost loves and old boyfriends.

Lorraine wasn't 27 now. She was 2. It was 1972, and Lonnie was in her Pacoima home combing the silky, fine hair of both her little girls, making them a promise neither of them was old enough to understand.

Everyone should have a goal in life, Lonnie was saying. Her own goal was right here at the end of this hairbrush.

To always remain close to her girls. To laugh with them, talk openly and candidly with them growing up - to share everything with them.

To be their mother as children, their friend as adults.

If she could achieve that goal, there would be nothing to do over again in her life, Lonnie Perez told her baby girls. She would have done it all.

And now here she was 25 years later in a crowded Santa Monica restaurant, looking around a big table where 18 laughing, happy women were having the time of their life, and feeling like the luckiest women alive.

``I thought to myself, `I'd do it all over again, and not change one thing in my life,' '' Lonnie said Tuesday. ``I had achieved my goal.''

Similar thoughts were on the minds of all the mothers sitting at this table Saturday - the special guests of daughters who still remain best friends 10 years after graduating together from Alemany High School in Mission Hills.

Daughters who had come up with this wacky, beautiful idea to throw their mothers a ``Mommy and Me Day.''

Sure they weren't their mothers' little babies anymore, sitting on mom's lap in the gym or cradled in her arms in a pool learning to swim.

No, now they were their mothers' big babies, the women laughed.

Grown, single women out in the world on their own trying to grab a toehold in their separate careers while trying to stay close with each other - high school best friends.

On those pizza and video nights when they stay up and talk till dawn, the only common denominator they can find to explain the women they have grown up to become are the women sitting with them at this restaurant table right now.

The women who were their mothers as children now are their friends as adults.

Lorraine Perez looked across the table and smiled as her mother pretended to be shocked at another woe-filled tale of lost loves and old boyfriends.

Soon - too soon - Lorraine knew, scenes like this one would become less frequent as careers flourished, marriages and children loomed, and time would become just too short - even for best friends and mothers.

Like all the daughters sitting here, she had been close to tears when it was her mother's turn to stand and share something she particularly loved about her daughter.

Funny, all the girls laughed later - they would have said the same things about their moms.

And now, it was time for them all to move on down the street to a place called Color Me Mine, where they'd finish off this special day by making their own ceramic plates.

Robynn Eastman and her mother, Donna; Sandra Cordero and her mom, Sonja; Tricia Gillis and her mom, Heidi; Kristine Stromeyer and her mom, Linda; Teri Sullivan and her mom, Eileen; Julie Overlock and her mom, Brenda; Isabel Vargas and her mom, also Isabel; Mindy Coverly and mom, Nancy Herr; and the Perez women, Lorraine and Lonnie.

A bunch of mommies and their grown me's - arm and arm, carrying on and laughing over woe-filled tales of lost loves, old boyfriends, and friendship.