Miranda & Bridget... A Somewhat Brief History

Ahhhh, I am thinking back to the fall of 2007. Miranda (she’s Mae to me and Aunt MaeMae to my kids) had just graduated Indiana University, and I had just transferred to Los Angeles with Medtronic as their headquarters, at that time, was based just an hour north in Northridge.

Mae and I were assigned the same training class along with 15 or so others from various parts of the US. The entire group of us was put up in the Woodland Hills Hilton, where we would live and work and eat together for the next four weeks.

I’d love to tell you that we bonded over our mutual love & obsessing over work (that came later), but what we really did was make each other laugh. A lot. We were both pretty broke, so we bonded over finding the best LA consignment shops and justifying overpriced bottle service at places like Hyde and Beauty Bar.

Miranda was the first friend I met in Los Angeles and like me, she was down for anything. We could go on hikes together, go out dancing together, take weekend side trips together. Finding friends anywhere as an adult can be tricky, but finding friends who are always down for whatever is especially tricky. 

After years of working together at Medtronic, Miranda broke my heart and moved back to her hometown of Pittsburgh. Her journey then took her to NYC, SF, and then around the world on a remote-year. I remained in Los Angeles, and Miranda always made time to visit.

Throughout the nearly two decades we’ve been friends, Miranda and I have shared in one another's successes, failures, boyfriends, and miscellaneous bad decisions. And we’ve always laughed our way through it together. In 2018, Miranda was living somewhere out in the wild- some other country I’d not yet had the opportunity to visit, when I was hospitalized during pregnancy for a verrrrrry long time, not to mention I had a one-year-old at home, learning to walk. Miranda, being the best friend she is, moved her life into our home and helped care for my daughter, Bel. She and my sister, Andrea, put together a nursery and stocked it full of all the essentials since I was unable to do so on my own.

She is my best friend, Godmother to my children, “Bridget-whisperer” to my husband, and now my partner in work. We wanted to bottle the experience we’d had as best friends, and that’s precisely what Portotonico is. Check out how it all came together in “Origin Story.”

- Ciao, Bridget!