E.R. SHIPP Goodbye to 'Friends'? Good riddance!

I never watched "Friends" -- just as I never watched "Seinfeld" -- but it has been nearly impossible to escape the hype surrounding the end of the 10-year-old NBC sitcom franchise.
I know we 21st-century Americans are constantly in search of things that unite us as a people. We often don't share the same language let alone the same traditions.
Easter? Too Christian.
May Day? Somehow that spring fling has become linked to leftist labor movements at home and abroad or, in protest, rightist celebrations of the law. Ugh.
Thanksgiving? American Indians don't like the way they've been written out of the fairy tale about the Pilgrims, and vegetarians don't like what we do to the turkeys.
Difficult as it is to find common ground, I understand the urge. But I absolutely hate being force-fed manufactured patriotic events like the end of "Friends" in print, on TV and radio, on the Internet, on billboards and on Amtrak.
What people say
J.J., a bartender I know, certainly didn't break into a lather over the impending end of "Friends" when I spoke to him last week.
"If I wasn't at the wedding, why would I go to the funeral?" he said. Still, like most of us, he couldn't completely escape the must-see-TV hype.
Harry, sitting around the bar during a break from work, said that the show was a turnoff for him because it was built around "mindless one-liners" and "prerecorded laughter."
Had I ever tuned in, that might have bothered me, too. But from what I gathered from all about me, what bothered me about "Friends" is what bothers me about Woody Allen's films. They purport to depict a New York that has absolutely nothing to do with me -- or most of the people I know. Neither "Friends" nor Allen's films are about the hometown that I know.
Still, 45 million people, including thousands in Times Square and other public gatherings, watched the last episode Thursday. I had more important matters to consider, like how longtime public servant Al Gore can afford to buy an entire network and why my cats, Frank Sinatra and Sammie Dee, are so not interested in going outside when given the chance to do so.
So let's suck it up and accept this weekend's analyses of the meaning of "Friends" and prepare ourselves for something we can really get into: the finale of "Frasier" on Thursday.
XE.R. Shipp is a columnist for the New York Daily News. She won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1996. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.