The Best Friend Experience with Jenny Mollen

I'm In The Corner, Watching You Kiss Her.

JennyMollen

Jun 22, 2026

This past Tuesday, I took my son Lazlo to the Hamptons to do a private padel camp with some of his friends from school. It was the kind of camp my father would have refused to pay for even if I begged, which is not the point of this story but also somehow the point of every story.

This place, Brisas, was filled with terracotta pots, bougie branded gear, and a little Airstream filled with fancy sparkling water. It was the perfect combination of rustic Mediterranean and millennial wellness capitalism. A bit like dating a consultant from McKinsey. The European branch, obviously.

After sleeping in and grumbling through morning calls, I rolled into the club a half hour before the end of the clinic to meet my friends and fellow moms, Olivia and Julia. I was distracted, under-caffeinated, and already emotionally unhinged. It had been a week. And by a week, I mean one hellish Monday.

I still hadn’t had coffee, which has always been a drug for me, except for when I used to do cocaine. Then it was just a drink.

“Does this place have espresso?” I groggily asked Olivia.

She pointed to a young guy hunched over his computer, making zero effort to engage. I forget if she referred to him as the manager, the club owner, or just someone who had barista experience. Either way, I was counting on his help.

“Hi! Can you help me get coffee?” I asked, hovering over him until he had no choice but to look up.

He stood from his computer, miffed, and walked into the Airstream. After several words were exchanged, I noticed his accent.

“Where are you from?” I inquired.

“France,” he said, sounding literally not the slightest bit French.

He explained that the espresso machine was not working and offered me a disgusting can of cold brew instead. I accepted, begrudgingly, then wandered with him back to the picnic bench where he was working. We talked about visas, cigarettes, and yogurt, all the normal things I talk to Europeans about.

There was an ease to the conversation. Nothing major, just friendly chit-chat in a place where I planned to avoid talking to anyone.

At some point, I forget why, I invited him and this other young guy who’d joined us to a party my girlfriend was hosting later in the month.

“You guys will love it. There will be hot models, ironic pool floats, and a frozen yogurt margarita machine,” I said, like I was Pantera Sarah manning a door at Sky Bar in the early aughts.

Later that night, he texted that it was nice meeting me and that he’d see me at the event. I found that funny for some reason, but liked the message anyway. I told him that he’d actually see me tomorrow because the kids still had another day of camp.

Then I added that the coffee machine had better be working.

He wrote that he couldn’t guarantee the coffee machine, but would have another can of cold brew waiting.

“Ugh, never mind then. I’ll bring my own. What’s your order.”

For the record, I buy everyone coffee all the time. I wasn’t trying to start anything with this person. I’m really never trying to start anything with anyone. I’m just extremely good at banter, and after spending over two decades as an actress, I have a PhD in making strangers feel like we have chemistry.

He replied that he was embarrassed to tell me, but then told me anyway. I love it when people do this, abandon their better judgment to bend to my will.

“Iced coconut latte,” he said.

“You’re French,” I shot back. “You should be ashamed of yourself. What the fuck even is a coconut latte?”

He laughed, then asked how I took my coffee.

The next morning, I picked up coffee for the entire club. When I arrived, they seemed positively giddy, as if they’d just won a pizza party for finishing their summer reading list.

Lazlo was showing off on the court, and I walked over to snap a few shots. However, when I reached for my phone, I realized I didn’t have it. I’d left it at the coffee shop.

It was Tuesday. I hadn’t even brought my laptop out of the city because I didn’t want my host to know I was a workaholic. Meaning, my phone was not just my phone. It was my entire lifeline.

“I’ll go pick it up for you,” the French guy offered. “Then I’ll keep it and just be you for the day.”

I laughed, then perked up the way I used to when somebody would say something that sounded like a killer tweet. There was a time between 2010 and 2014 when my brain literally thought in 160 characters or less, which I’m sure made me absolutely insufferable.

“Yes,” I said. “You can have my phone for the day.”

“I’ll give you my password. You can do whatever you want. This will be a great social experiment. I shouldn’t be on it anyway.”

“You’re crazy,” he said, looking at me the way people look at me when they have no idea just how crazy I actually am.

Maybe this sounded crazy to him, but on the Jenny scale of one to utterly fucking batshit, this felt like a 2.5 tops.

He was a total stranger. There wasn’t anything he could read or see that would embarrass me. There was nothing that could hurt his feelings, trigger his abandonment issues, or end with me apologizing for reminding him of his mother. Who cared if he could go through my photos and see ten thousand nudes? People could do that to me with a simple Google search. We didn’t have friends in common, children together, or a single overlap in the world.

This was low-stakes humiliation.

“Okay,” he said, nodding.

I went back to the coffee shop to pick up my phone. On my way back to the club, I did a quick pass. Maybe I should have hidden my Notes app, which read like I was an angry lesbian folk singer. Or, at a minimum, logged out of Venmo. But I didn’t. I had to commit to the bit. And part of the bit was exposing myself completely. I didn’t get to choose what he saw, who he answered in my texts, or what he posted to my stories. I had to let go.

Before relinquishing control, I gave him just three pieces of information: my password, my assistants’ names, and a small list of people not to engage with. That was it. The rest of my life, he’d have to ruin intuitively.

He agreed, then confidently confiscated my entire world and drove away.

I wasn’t even sure he was allowed to leave the padel club. Didn’t he work there? Wasn’t I paying him, or somebody who looked exactly like him, to teach my son? Or maybe now that he had my phone, he was heading straight to Buenos Aires. I didn’t fucking know, and it was too late to find out.

I tried not to ask further questions and instead focused on the blissful silence of being completely unplugged.

That lasted fifteen minutes.

Then I started spiraling.

My friend Olivia was having a small party that evening, and I told her she needed to invite the guy with my phone because, at some point, I’d probably need to see it again. Olivia stared at me for a beat, the way mothers stare at other mothers when they realize no one is technically in charge.

For the rest of the day, I was unable to function. I couldn’t check the time. I couldn’t take notes. I couldn’t reference the cute outfit on the girl I recently started following on Instagram. I couldn’t send my assistant texts like,

I usually have someone posting alongside me on my digital platforms, so I am used to sharing a steering wheel. But usually, we are aligned on the direction. This guy, whose name I still hadn’t fully mastered saying aloud, could have done anything.

For the most part, he played it cool. Perhaps too cool.