Day 36: Friday, March 24
I was pretty
determined not to do anything Friday—other than go to the show, that is.
It was cold—really cold, dog-freezing cold—so I
wasn’t going to leave until I needed to. (Given the weather forecasts, it was
supposed to be our last really cold day of the trip. Sunday the 26th
was pretty chilly, though, especially in the evening.) That said, since I was
meeting a friend who'd played my husband in Hairspray for a theoretical cup of coffee (I don’t drink coffee and I
have no idea if he does), I was determined to walk up to meet him.
We’d decided to
meet at a coffee place on 51st that I’d chosen arbitrarily based on
where his hotel was. Little did I know that half the population of Manhattan
had also chosen to go there as well. To quote Sam Beckett in Scene 5, “there
were no seats,” so we repaired* to a little coffee shop on Eighth Avenue.
As many times
as I’ve been on Eighth, I’d never been in the Cosmic Diner (Pidge’s preferred
New York hotel is only a couple of blocks away, but my journeys had never
brought me here). It was actually quite nice, although the cosmicness of its
name doesn’t really translate into the décor. It’s a standard old-school New
York diner. There used to be a million of them, but they grow rarer all the
time, to be replaced by Citibanks and Duane Reades.
Whatever its
name, its wait staff was classic New York. Entering, the hostess asked “Two?
Follow Tony.” Tony, our waiter, was already more than halfway to the table, bearing
two of the establishment’s surprisingly-extensive menus. We sat and looked
things over. As usual, I didn’t want to eat before a show, but was kind of
peckish, so I had an English muffin with butter and jelly. Charles had
matzoh-ball soup and a diet Coke. We were big spenders.
The Cosmic
seems to get an interesting clientele. I heard someone in back of us talking
theatre, as were we, but when the name “Jack O’Brien” came up, I was kind of
surprised. That’s not the kind of name one generally hears in “civilian”
conversations. There were really all kinds of people in there, many of them
seeming to be regulars. It was nowhere near packed, though, so I was surprised
when, after an hour or so (and, really, about the time I needed to be heading
to the theatre), Tony started making it clear he was done with us. Even though
he’d been reasonably friendly when taking our orders and bringing the food (and
offering a refill of hot water for my Lipton tea—which really doesn’t stand up
to a second dunking), he began by clearing the dishes, then a little while
later, the silverware and napkins, then a little while later, the water
glasses, making it clear our rental of the table had come to an end. We went
out, took a selfie, and I headed to my show while he headed to his (which
turned out to be Hello, Dolly; a show I should have every
interest in seeing, but for which I have none.)
When Turnblads reune
When I arrived,
much later than usual, I was surprised to see Brendan already there. He’d
gotten the show times mixed up (we perform on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30,
rather than the usual 7:30), so we had time to chat and run things over.
Whatever we did, though, paid off big time during the show, as between what we
were doing and a very good audience (and, again, his entrance was the key), it
may have been our best show yet. Everything just seemed to click. We were
listening really well to each other, reacting appropriately and in the moment,
and it was all pretty much what I’d wanted from a production.
And, as before,
I had no idea how to replicate anything I’d done.
I changed, went
out into the lobby and was bowled over by the sight of the AFLers.
I would rather be with these folks than with the finest people
I’d say “a word
of explanation” here, but it’s going to take far more than a word. Back in
1993, when I got back to Oregon from Russia, I had occasion to have something I’d
written printed. In those days, if one needed something that they’d written on
a computer printed out, one generally sent it to the campus computer center
where it would go into a queue and eventually show up in a cubby, printed in
primitive dot-matrix on green-and-white striped paper.
So I was in the
computer center, picking something up, and saw a terminal and thought something
to the effect of “Hey, I’ve heard of this World Wide Web thing; why not see
what’s on it.” (Even that’s a bit disingenuous. A friend of mine had Prodigy in
1991 and I’d fooled around a little on that. Still … ) I searched on some
topics of interest and came across what little content there was in those days.
Eventually, I
discovered the computer center somewhere on the University of Oregon campus (in
the days before it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Phil Knight,
Incorporated)—maybe the engineering building?—and discovered banks of Macs
that were available for anyone to use to surf the rudimentary web.
I would be in
there for hours. It was summer, I wasn’t working much, and it was fascinating
to me. Eventually, I discovered Usenet, which was a series of bulletin boards
devoted to pretty much any topic you could think of. I gravitated to
alt.fan.letterman, which was populated by folks who were interested in talking
about Dave Letterman’s late night shows (by this time, Dave had already left Late
Night and was gearing up for The Late Show at CBS). The people on the board
were knowledgeable about the show, funny, and interesting, and I soon became a
regular.
The group
actually took on a real-life aspect, as every year, a small core group would
gather in New York to have lunch, see a Late Show taping, generally get a
backstage tour from Tony Mendez (the cue-card guy), then have dinner. These
gatherings were known as DaveCons. (I went to at least three. I remember my
first one where I introduced myself to a number of people whom I knew pretty
well but had never met) Most of the regulars live in the Tri-State area, so it wasn’t
too much of a haul for them to come into the city for a day (assuming they didn’t
already live here).
Over the years,
Usenet (which still exists—sort of—as Google Groups) became overrun by trolls
and the insane, so groups gravitated somewhere else. In our case, we’ve had a
Facebook group for years now. Even though Dave’s been off the air for years
now, we still keep in touch and are interested in each others’ lives. I’d (of course)
posted info about my show, and knew some of them were going to try to come. I
just didn’t know when. One of the AFLers (a copy editor at The New York Times)
had told me she was planning on coming on Saturday the 25th, so I
had that in the back of my head.
All that said,
when I came out and saw the AFLers, I was moved to tears. I mean, I knew they
were probably going to come, but seeing them there really touched me. (And I
realized afterward, it’s probably the last time I’m ever going to see some of
them, since we have no reason to gather anymore.)
We had a great
time, talking over the show and old times. We went down to the bar, had a drink
or two; I showed them our dressing room (which, other than mirrors, a crummy
couch, and some smelly costumes, doesn’t have much to offer), and we split up.
They gave me a fan from the last DaveCon (in 2015) and a box, which I didn’t
open until the next day.
After about an
hour or so, we split up and went our various ways. I shared a subway as far as
I could with the copy-editor, who had actually missed the performance. The F
train wasn’t running, so that made her late. She took a Lyft and hit bad, bad
traffic, and would have made it except her driver suddenly made a 17-block
detour in the wrong direction, throwing her completely off. She arrived at
8:45, but went for a drink until the end of the show. I detrained at Astor
Place and walked home to have dinner.
My plan was to
make a sandwich with some of the cold cuts I’d bought weeks ago, supplemented
with some leftover mashed potatoes from a restaurant, but some of the meat
looked suspicious enough and the potatoes, while tasting okay, had a bit of
grey fuzz next to them, so I opted to not eat them. I had enough backup
supplies that I could make a very credible turkey sandwich, so with that, I
went up to bed.
*Whenever I’m
tempted to use that word in this context, I will forever be reminded of my high
school German teacher, Lawrence Blakely Barnes (known as “Larry”), who mocked
the language in my beloved Doc Savage novels as using such locutions as “They
repaired to the garage.”
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