One of the most fun parts of last week's presentation in NYC for Bastille Day was the opportunity to reconnect with a long-lost friend, Lisa A.
Lisa A. and I knew each other about 23 or 24 years ago. She was 16 and I was 20, and we met while doing a little theatre production of "Grease". She was energetic, fun, and for a little tiny girl, she packed a really big singing voice. We both played the group of simpering cheerleaders, and she was the head cheerleader, Patty Simcox. (In the photo, I'm the one in the front row, center and Lisa A. is the one on the far right. My God, were we really EVER that young?) We had the time of our lives - both of us loved performing.
I remember that Lisa had a very big challenge during that play. A few weeks into rehearsals, she was a passenger in a car accident that happened on the icy winter roads, and she broke her jaw, which had to be wired shut. She, and the rest of us, wondered how she would be able to continue in the play since she not only had lines to speak, but songs to sing. Stan, the director, came to the rescue and worked with her to teach her ventriloquism techniques to teach her how to project her voice through her teeth - and he wrote it into the play that her character had been hit in the mouth by a football. And it all worked beautifully - so well, in fact, that when Lisa got the wires off her jaw after the play opened, Stan told her to keep playing the part exactly the same way, because it was so funny. She did, and she was perfect.
After "Grease", I tried out for the next play at that theatre but sadly, wasn't picked. I moved on to other things, and lost touch with Lisa and the rest of the cast. She was still in high school, I was finishing college, and we had very different lives.
Fast forward 23 years, to this past spring. My niece, Beth, who will be 13 next week, has been acting in plays since the age of 8, and in the spring she was in a production of "Annie" at Pax Amicus Theatre - the same theatre where I did "Grease" all those years earlier. (Obviously, it's time for the next generation of actors in this family!) Beth's director, Richard, had played "Danny" with me in Grease, and Stan was still the owner of the theatre, and it made me remember what fun I had there. One day, I found myself telling Beth about my experiences there, and what happened to Lisa, by way of showing her how hard actors will work when they want to be in a play and what obstacles sometimes have to be overcome.
A few days later, I was surfing the web for resources in Paris and came across the BonjourParis.com web site. While casing the site, I found a page that listed bios of their contributing writers, which interested me for the obvious reasons - I want to be a paid writer in Paris. Imagine my great surprise to see Lisa A.'s name and photo on that site! It felt too strange to be a coincidence - here I was just talking about her to my niece, when I hadn't really thought about doing that play in many years, and now here was Lisa again, on a Paris-related web site.
I decided to try and contact Lisa through the magazine, and sent a rather generic-sounding email off that same day. Several weeks went by without any response from anyone and I pretty much had forgotten all about it. Then one day, I got an email from Lisa, I wrote back, we emailed a few more times and then found time to talk on the phone - for several hours!
Neither of us can get over what feels like the Universe helping us reconnect for a reason. We knew each other a long time ago and had fun with the group we hung out with, but we never really developed a lasting friendship at that time. But here, years later, we were discovering how much we actually have in common NOW - besides our first names.
We're both writers. We're both passionate about France, Paris and the idea of getting paid to travel and write about it. Neither of us has been married and neither of us have children. We have similar outlooks on life in many ways.
Because I was to be in New York last week, and that's where Lisa now lives and works, I invited her to come to the Bastille Day event and suggested we get dinner afterward, which is what we did. So, we had the fun of also realizing we have very similar tastes in clothes (our individual choices of attire that day were so well color-coordinated it was a bit scary!) and talking about her working on getting into a career as an opera singer.
Mainly, it was just delightful to know that it's possible to reconnect with someone I knew so long ago and to find that I have something in common with them. It's like rediscovering another kindred spirit. When you are in your 40's and "still Single", finding other single women to befriend and relate to is really important - at least it is to me. We had fun comparing ourselves to the characters in "Sex and the City" (both agreeing neither of us was very much like the rather uptight Charlotte) and brainstorming ways we might combine our talents in writing and interests in travel to do a project or two together (stay tuned on that - we have no idea where this might go!)
Since I don't believe in accidents or coincidences, I know there is something "up" with the Universe on this one... there are reasons, not yet revealed, why Lisa and I would reconnect after 23 years in this way - reasons beyond just having a nice opportunity to remember the "old days". In the meantime, between being able to meet such a interesting cross-cultural group last Thursday, and being able to have a fun and delicious dinner out in "The City" with an old friend, Bastille Day was a memorable event for me in 2005. Vive la France!
