When you do shows with people, there is this strange familial intensity of time, wherein these (sometime) total strangers, become the people you (for all intent and purposes) live with for two months (or more) of your life.
…And then, the show ends, and that living arrangement breaks up.
…You all go your separate ways…sometimes to OTHER shows with each other later in the season…or in the next…or five years after…or maybe, never again. But aside from the total transplants and floaters, even if NOT working directly with these actors again, chances are: you’re gonna see ‘em.
…See ‘em in passing. See ‘em at Opening Night parties, or casting calls, or on stage in other shows.
…And sometimes you get that little misty spike of endearment pop up, even just in those short moments together…when the chat comes super easy, and the catching up runs a mile a minute, and you both say, “Gawd, why the hell don’t we go out for drinks some time or something-or-other?!?”
…And you REALLY TRULY intend to…
…But then “life” and shows and movies and things happen…like one fucking thing after another (it seems)…
…And then it’s three years later, at the concession stand, waiting for your too expensive glass of bad house red to be poured out, seeing one another again…
…And it’s the same song, and the same dance, to the same tune…because there is obviously a genuine affection and intention there…as you (again) strike up a conversation like it was all yesterday when last you met, and it all ends with the same declarations of “friend dates” and nonsense hang-time in the pending scheduling…
…But it still doesn’t happen.
This occurrence is a regular phenomenon of the theatrical profession. Furious affections can lay dormant for years of time, and be revived immediately at first sight…years and years later…as if waking from a broken spell all of a sudden…like in a fairy tale.
Thankfully, we are (in current day) given the divination of the Facebook Fairy Godmother…so that even if we DON’T see our former family loves for half-decades at a time, we can still keep tabs on them from afar…
…Which (as tonight’s former castie-love, The Prodigal Blonde, pointed out), may be slightly freaky and stockerish…but gets the job done. Cutting out whole former initial necessitated opening lines like:
“Oh wow! How the hell ARE you?!”
“What have you been doing with yourself?!”
“Shut up, what?! You’re MARRIED now?!”
…Allowing us to cut right to the meat of the matter, instead…like:
“My god, it’s been…how long?! You look fantastic! Shut up, and you have a baby now! And that trip you took to France? Those pictures were AWESOME!! P.S. I really love your last headshot sitting!”
…Which obviously helps to make the ABSOLUTE MOST of our precious, cherished moments, whilst finally flung together for a matter of moments (waiting in line for the ladies loo, for instance), so as to not waste even a millisecond of visit time.
The Facebook (and other general social media) has become not only the ESSENTIAL self-marketing and networking tool of the artistic world…it has also helped us to Celebrity Stock our own friends, (as they orbit in the world outside of our immediate own), so that when (by chance), we actually DO manage to meet up for that drink we’ve promised to meet over for about seven years now (or maybe slightly less), we can just immediately get down and dirty to the real poop-hammock story realness of it all…
…Jump right into the deep end of cracking one another up, sparring wits, iknowwhatyoumeaning, and hearing (at least in this instance) that totally hilarious inverted squeak…of The Prodigal Blonde…which is one of the most wondrously definitive laughs of all time…
…Immediately sending you back, to that one rehearsal, when you heard it for the first time, snorfled, and said something like:
“Um. What. Was. That. I’ve never heard a human make those kind of sounds. That’s not your REAL laugh. NOBODY laughs like that.”
…Which is how (I pretty sure) our whole friend-affair first began, (at least in MY book.)
…The end? infinitely ongoing.
~D
