Bookends
We met up in a Greek diner, their suggestion; symphony of faux classical statuary and knotty pine. We hadn’t gotten together since we literally couldn’t remember when, because a.) it’s been so long, and b.) our memories are faulty. Over time, the three of us have changed, but (and this is important) not so much that we wouldn’t have known each other immediately anywhere.
What we talked about most was the thing that connected us at our beginning: middle school and high school theater.
Between our turns at acting and directing and stage managing, working on set crew and sourcing costumes, our lives from ages twelve to seventeen wrapped around upcoming performances. The Cherry Orchard. A Doll’s House. Death of a Salesman. Weighty adult dramas falling into nerdy, fearless adolescent hands.
Oh, stuff happened. It was DRAMA CLUB! Sensitive girls and boys hitting puberty like high-speed car chase wrecks. We felt our pain and our joy deeply. We expressed ourselves boldly. We could be, and often were, self-important jerks. But we were also a team. Not only could we transport an audience, we could design and Xerox the programs.
Yet, here we were, decades later, three grown-ass ladies laughing at ourselves and how much we believed we knew back then, but how precious little we actually did. What wisdom we have gained since then is starting to lose traction, though as one of us pointed out, we had gone out into the world to live pretty good lives. Young us would have considered “pretty good” a tragic waste of our prodigious talent, but us, now, recognizes, gratefully, the serendipitous big break we didn’t know we were waiting for.