Happy Birthday, Brooke

Due to the recent untimely death of my old friend Brett, I have been feeling very close to my old college crowd. Most of us all still live in the same general area (Mitchell being the notable exception, who is in Chicago). We were theatre kids. Of course we’re all still in New York (or Chicago). Today is Brooke’s birthday. We drove up to Hartford together for Brett’s funeral services, and we talked about him the whole way, of course. It is so strange to think of him being … gone. From this earth. We have all known one another since we were teenagers. Messy, crazy, intense theatre-geek teenagers. Having romances, dealing with messy situations, studying acting as hard as we could, all at age 19, 20, before we were fully formed yet … and the friendships continued. They liked me before I knew I was likable. Friendships like these have to do with essences. My essence is the same now, as a grown woman, as it was when I was 5, 15, 25. And the friends I have saw my essence, and the same is true for me with them. Precious. Friendships are precious. To have a peer ripped from us (he was fine on Friday and dead by Wednesday) is shocking, and makes the bonds we share that much more precious. We are all realizing what we have right now.

It’s Brooke’s birthday today.

In honor of my good old friend Brooke, here is the following. A completely memorable photo shoot which involved a laughing-fit that was so inappropriate and so huge that Brooke and I actually got in trouble for it.

In college, I was in a production of Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch (excerpt here). It is a grim bleak play about a bunch of hopeless people in a dusty nowheresville town.

I was in it with Mitchell, Brooke, Nancy, Joanne, other dear friends. I’m still very proud of that show, and what we were able to create.

However.

We had a photo call after one of the productions. All of the photos I have of that show are from that night. And Brooke and I, who played teenage-girl best friends – Patsy and Lena – were possessed by a DEMON of laughter, of the laughing-in-church variety and we could not stop. We would get it together for one particular shot, and the second the camera clicked, we would EXPLODE in laughter again. We got in trouble! We got yelled at! “Girls, we have a lot to get through – can you keep it together?”

No, frankly. WE CANNOT.

It ended up not even being funny. It was agony. We would determinedly not look at each other, but we could FEEL one another peripherally … I could see Brooke’s shoulders shaking, and I would LOSE it which would set her off. The bad thing about all of this (or, one of the bad things) is that it was one of those shows where everyone was onstage at the same time. So even if the focus wasn’t on us, we were in the background, so not only were we ruining our own shots, we were ruining other people’s (which was much much worse). We laughed, I am not kidding, for four hours straight. We cried rivers of tears. We had to have our makeup redone. We were unbelievably unprofessional.

The joke began in this way: The play, as I mentioned, is grim and dark. Nobody in the play is happy. It is a terrible story. So there’s that. It’s not like we could somehow turn our laughter into something that would work for the photos. We were totally TRAPPED. We played Patsy and Lena, two bored high school girls in the 1950s in a little dust-bowl Bible Belt town. Brooke played Patsy, a restless “fast” girl, a bit of a slut in those days, she put out … and she had big dreams for herself. She was gonna get OUT of that town. (Keep dreamin’, sister.) I played her kind of dumpy sidekick, Lena, who was a much more conventional person. She had a boyfriend, and that was important to her … she wants to get married and have kids, settle down in the town … but she also has deep THOUGHTS about things and wants to SHARE it with her boyfriend, who, frankly, couldn’t care less, and basically tries to date-rape her every time they go out. Lena, of course, is a virgin (unlike Patsy), and wants to be one on her wedding night (typecasting. Exhibit A.). Her dreams for herself are so different from the reality. There are awful wrestling-match scenes between Lena and her boyfriend, where she would be trying to talk about the universe or God and he’s jamming his hand down her blouse. But this is the guy for her. Lena is not the type to flirt around, or find someone more suitable. She’ll marry him. And in a year or two she will be as grim and judgmental as all the other women in the town.

Meanwhile, Patsy is falling in love (“love”) with an aimless trucker who comes through town, who seems glamorous, like he could take her somewhere, take her out of the town … but she’s going to sleep with him, get pregnant, and in the process trap him and herself.

Okay, so there’s the setup. BLEAK.

Brooke and I had been friends for a year or so when we did Rimers, but Rimers solidified our bond. To this day, if we find ourselves at a bar picking out songs on the jukebox, Brooke will glance at me and say, “We are totally Patsy and Lena right now.”

So the joke during photo call, which began innocently but then ballooned into a laughing fit that annoyed pretty much EVERYONE, was that during the scenes where we weren’t in focus, but were in the background, we started joking that the two of us would be boozing it up like two blowsy whores – so the characters in focus would be doing their judgmental grim thing, but in the background would be a blurry image of the two of us, teenage bobbysoxers, clinking glasses, or rubbing our breasts lasciviously at the camera or bending over winking grotesquely – all SO not in the world of Rimers, so incongruous (it was the incongruity that struck our funny bones) … and finally, we couldn’t stop. We found it so hilarious that we were totally overtaken. We would stand in the background of scenes, arms clenched across our stomachs, trying to hold it in while the photos of the other actors were taken. Tears streamed down our faces. We were reprimanded repeatedly. We begged for mercy. “I’m so sorry – we can’t stop!!”

So now. I have those Rimers photos. I am amazed at how much we were able to keep it together. Each photo represents about 4 or 5 tries from the photographer to get us in between wild guffaws. Unprofessional! Annoying!

At the end of the night, the costume designer wanted stills of each character in their costumes, so there was one photo taken of me, in my dress, and then Brooke and I had to stand together and get our picture taken. These last photos were not about acting a particular scene, it was only about getting a shot of the dresses we were wearing, so we were able to let it out a little bit. In the first one, I am obviously blurry, I am moving on by, completely undone by the hilarity I am trapped in. In the second one, you can see that we are both a bit blurry, because we are still thrashing about in the throes of our shared FIT, and I look, frankly, insane. A demon has overtaken me and it has worn me OUT.

I love these pictures. The birth of a lifelong friendship.

I love you, Brooke. Happy birthday.

We are out of control.

We are clenched up and tense in the background, trying to contain it.

This one was a relief since at least our teary-streamed laughing faces didn’t show. BUT – we were facing our friends, and so we were ruining THEIR shots.

We are supposed to be crying here. Oh yes, we were crying. But with laughter.

Here I am getting date-raped while I talk about God, and also deal with the convulsions of laughter.

Post photo-shoot, blurry, completely out of control.

Patsy and Lena. LUNATICS of the Bible Belt.