“Please don’t ask Mr. Tuohy if you can be in the play. He’s told us to tell all our friends that didn’t get picked not to beg for a part,” my friend who’d gotten picked for a part advised me sympathetically.
I knew my life would be different if I wasn’t in that play, the annual event where the boys’ school and girls’ school got together and high school romances began leading to marriage and babies. And this year the play, the musical – and I loved to sing! – was being performed at a major theater downtown, one of the grand old ladies dating before vaudeville, just before it closed because movie theaters, like the rest of us, were moving to the suburbs.
Don’t complain if all fall your friends are too busy for you, not because of homework or babysitting but because of rehearsals and all the flirting and horseplay they’re a part of and you’re not. I didn’t. I tried out the role of maturity – the gracious loser, head held high with a sincere smile for all the winners.
An ill wind that blows no good – every cloud has a silver lining, platitudes were cold comfort. I was invited to opening night on my first date by a boy uninvolved in the play, because he was too shy. A nice “dip” as we called nerds those days. He came to the door to pick me up. My mother liked him because he was the doctor’s son. We walked to his family’s station wagon. His brother was driving. Danny opened the back door for me and went around to sit in the front passenger seat. In the car, I turned from the door as it slammed shut to look at him in the front seat. The family dog, a St Bernard sitting next to me leaned forward to lick my face
