The Bar-B's: 'Heartbreak' Melinda Galiano, Jupiter; 'Purple Haze' Denise Taylor, Lake Worth; 'DoubleD' Donna McKee, Loxahatchee; 'Grey Guse' Gail Clark, Boynton Beach, and 'Tuck-n-Roll' Kristin Groleau, Boynton Beach. (Thomas Cordy / Palm Beach Post)

Denise Taylor goes around the table air-kissing her three girlfriends before sitting down for their weekly lunch at the Cheesecake Factory at CityPlace in West Palm Beach.

“Hello, dawling,” Denise says, setting down her Coach bag just as Melinda Galiano is finally off her cellphone. “Cute shirt!”

Melinda wags her head and flips her hair over her bare-shoulder designer blouse, a bling-bling watch sparkling to match the blinding rock on the ring finger of her left hand. Denise’s own Brighton bracelets jangle as she waves hello.

Gail Clark and Kristin Groleau are chatting – all hands, mind you – across the table as Kristin punches information into a BlackBerry that seems surgically attached to her left hand. It’s no surprise they all call her the “secretary” of their little social group, the Bar-Bs.

Today, as on most days, the topic du jour is the same: When are they going out for their next motorcycle ride?

Forget what you’ve heard about women riding on the back of hogs. These four women are the new eye-lined, lip-sticked and powdered face of women motorcyclists. Think Sex and the City meets Sons of Anarchy.

Or, as Melinda loves to say, “pretty girls on pretty bikes.”

It wasn’t long ago that a woman looked Melinda up and down, from her Gucci loafers to her perfectly coiffed golden hair and asked, “You ride a motorcycle?”

Yes, she does. And so do an increasing number of well-off 40- and 50-something-year-olds, who’ve mirrored the independence they’ve found at the helm of a motorcycle in their personal lives. Since 2003, the number of women bikers has gone up from 9.6 percent to 12.3 percent in 2008, the last year for which statistics are available, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council, a national nonprofit that promotes motorcycling.

These women didn’t get into riding to keep up with their husbands or boyfriends. It’s an adventure of their own.

“I don’t want him to ride,” Kristin said of her long-time partner and the father of her 2-year-old. “He’s too dangerous behind the wheel of a car, as it is.”

Oh, there is still a rough-and-tumble nature to bikers. The Bar-Bs, officially, are a “group” not an organized “club,” which has all sorts of fraternity-like requirements such as never riding alone or never riding without wearing your “colors.” Those offenses can still end in bar fights, the women say.

So call them a club at your own risk, but note this about the Bar-Bs: They’re all about the matching T-shirts and cute nicknames. Kristin, the former dirt bike rider, is Tuck & Roll Bar-B. Denise, who always wears something purple, is Purple Haze Bar-B. Gail is Grey Guse Bar-B, and keeps a teddy bear holding a bottle of Grey Goose on the back of her chopper. And Melinda is Heartbreak Bar-B. (The reason why should be withheld, they all agreed).

“People have the wrong picture in their minds,” Melinda said, adding that they all make sure to wear their wedding bands whenever they ride or enter a bar.

“It keeps the riff-raff away,” Kristin said.

Instead, theirs truly is a sisterhood of traveling choppers. They have ridden all over the country at the helm of their bikes and always keep tabs on each other.

Like sisters

When Gail and her boyfriend rode the Hoka Hey run – 8,142 miles over 13 days from Key West to Alaska – Melinda texted her incessantly to check up on her. She sent Gail off with the blessed, crystal rosary Melinda’s godfather had brought back from the Vatican during a military tour of duty in the 1960s.

It was Gail’s boyfriend who presided over the wedding of Melinda and her husband, Gary . And Melinda and Denise met their husbands at the same bike night and were married three years ago, one month apart.

“We’re like sisters,” Melinda said. “I know if something happened to me, my friends would take care of everything.”

All of them came to riding in different ways.

Denise, 51, grew up in Fort Lauderdale watching her father ride motorcycles. But he never taught her to ride or even let her onto the back of his bike. For years, after meeting her husband at bike night, she rode on the back of his motorcycle on long rides.

She guesses there are dozens of cellphone pictures from stunned drivers who caught her reading a book on the back of his motorcycles on a ride to Minnesota.

“You get tired of looking at the back of someone’s head,” she said.

Gail, 54, grew up in New Hampshire, the tomboy of four sisters, playing a host of sports. Her mother successfully sued the school board before Title IX to get her daughter on the school soccer team.

She used to ride to California and back on the back of her ex-husband’s motorcycle every summer, but never wanted to take the reins herself because she was the mother of two young boys.

“I had two boys and just didn’t feel it was the responsible thing for me to ride,” she said. “So I waited.”

With her sons grown, she got her license at age 47, seven years ago. Today, the owner of a pest control company, she still prefers a comfortable Salty Dog Saloon T-shirt and shorts instead of a frilly dress or skirt. And she still is a formidable golfer, with a 14 handicap.

It was Gail who told Melinda: “Go get your own bike. You can do it.”

Melinda, 56, had been a Manhattan restaurateur, who grew up going to the New York Metropolitan Opera House and was on a first-name basis with the staff at Ferragamo – until her divorce. She said she lost everything and moved to Florida to live with her parents, starting over as a commercial real estate broker at age 45.

Her image of bikers was like most people’s – hard-living, rough-around-the-edge free spirits with no responsibilities – until she went to drop off a gift for Toys for Tots as part of a motorcycle-ride fundraiser.

$4,000 for used bike

She was skittish around what looked like “5 miles of motorcycles” gurgling up the road until she ran into a banker she knew who, instead of his three-button suit, was wearing his riding leathers.

He persuaded her to go to bike night at a local bar. Melinda was overwhelmed by how friendly the people were – a shock to a native Queens girl, she says.

“That’s what everybody thinks. That it’s dirt bags and guys with guns, and it’s not,” Kristin added.

Eventually, at that very bar, on a bike night, Melinda handed a new friend a $4,000 check for a used motorcycle as those around her clapped and hooted and hollered.

“You would’ve thought I’d just been offered a scholarship to Cambridge,” said Melinda, who carries a compact in her bike’s saddlebags.

Kristin, 39, a Boynton Beach native, has been riding motorcycles since she was 5. The exhaust of her first bike, a Honda Trail 70 dirt bike, is displayed like polished chrome artwork on one wall in her home. But she didn’t own a bike for years as an adult.

“I got tired of going to pick up men on bikes just so I could ride on the back,” she said. “I loved going out on a bike, but depending on someone else got so old.”

So the four women who met at bike night “just stayed friends,” Denise said.

Now, they ride on the weekends and in charity rides. “Bikers, they are the most charitable, wonderful people,” said Melinda, who organizes several charity events locally. Mostly, they ride for the feel of freedom they say you can only experience on a motorcycle.

“Only a biker understands why your dog sticks its head out the window,” Gail said.

And at every stop, the fab four help the image of women motorcycle riders go biker chick to biker chic.

“The old image of motorcycles ” Gail said, with Melinda finishing her thought, ” is gone.”