Sallyacious

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November 04, 2006

The Sideshow Is Here

read the card with the roses that were delivered to me backstage.

Nothing else.

When the roses were first brought to me, I assumed they were from my parents. "No," said the House Manager. "I was talking to your parents in the lobby. They're from somebody else." So I tore into the card only to find the above cryptic message and nothing else.

Which is when I started guessing at who they might have come from. My castmates were all insisting it was Dave being mysterious and romantic, but I didn't think so. That's not his style at all. Plus, the handwriting was familiar.

My first thought was my friends Karma and Cyndi. The note sounded just like them. But driving all the way here from Boise and Twin Falls just to see me in a play did not sound like the sort of thing they'd do.

I pondered it all during the show. When I should have been thinking about other things. At some point during the first act, I realized that Dave had probably actually spoken to the mystery people on the phone that afternoon. He'd answered his phone in a very familiar tone, chatted with the person on the other end and said, "Yeah, I'll be there...Probably not." So I knew that had been about the show, because he saw it once and cannot see it again. But when I asked him who it was, he said, "Oh. It was Claire, she's in my playwriting class."

I believed that until the roses came. Even though his tone on the call was far too familiar and friendly for it to have been a person he'd only mentioned to me once.

There was only one other set of friends who might have written that card, Katie & Judy, and they live in Portland, six hours away. I couldn't imagine them leaving their busy lives to see the show either.

It drove me crazy during the performance. Which was very good, by the way. Aside from the fact that my ears plugged right before the play started and I felt like I spent most of the performance at the bottom of a well, shouting my lines out of it and hearing others' lines drift down to me. When we got to the Requiem (the final scene of the play), I could hear the sniffly noses. And part way through my final monologue, I heard some people break into actual sobs.

Good show.

I raced into the dressing room, tore off my costume & shoved into my own clothes, scurried into the makeup room and scrubbed my face at breakneck speed. I did take the time to thank local friends who stopped backstage to say hello and good show. I'm not a total pig.

Then I grabbed my bag, my coat and my roses and headed up into the lobby. I figured I could look for the people with my parents. And there they were. Karma and Cyndi, who had driven 9 and 6 hours respectively to come see me in this show. All of a sudden, I wasn't 39 anymore. I was eight, running across the lobby yelling, "I thought it was you! I thought it was you! I thought it was you!" It must have been quite a sight for those people who didn't know me and who had last seen me dressed in black, weeping uncontrollably.

I have the best friends in the world.

Posted by sally at November 4, 2006 09:25 AM

Comments

Posted by: goodkarma at November 5, 2006 07:29 PM

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