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And he was right.
I didn t love him enough to be a good girlfriend any more
than he had the ability to love me enough to grow into the
kind of partner he knew I needed.What started as a chummy
alliance with a best friend you have fun making out with de-
volved into constant rounds of bickering with an alien you re-
sented because he kept you from the enjoyment of the world s
getting the full benefit of your ambiguous potential.
During the second summer I spent on vacation with his
family, Patrick and I sat on the beach after a walk. I d watched
his brothers and sisters light fireworks the night before while I
sat a safe, Semitic distance away from the explosions, my hands
folded in my lap.As we sat on damp sand and the tide got low, I
suggested to Patrick that we try to live separately and see what
it was like to take that step back, but still be together. We
weren t breaking up; he would just move out, and maybe our
relationship would go back to being fun, like it was before we
got to know each other better.
That always works! Because time goes backward, not
forward right?
He thought about it and later agreed that the plan made
sense, over pulled-pork sandwiches at a shoreside BBQ joint,
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the mascot of which was a cartoon pig wearing a chef s hat,
jollily searing the flesh of one of its own.
A month later, Patrick and his stuff were gone from my
apartment.And not long after that, I began exchanging daily e-
mails with a Broadway actor I didn t know, on whom I devel-
oped an obsessive crush. I was handling the not-breakup very
well, or the Irish Catholic way of not at all. Who said the
Irish were the only group immune to psychotherapy? Was it
Freud, or Freud via Martin Scorsese in that ham-handed movie
The Departed? I ve always found the Irish really attractive they
make wonderful writers and sexy firefighters, and if they didn t
like the Red Sox they d be perfect. But their not dealing with
stuff thing may have been contagious, because I handled the
dissolution of my living situation with Patrick by not handling
it, and instead decided to pour all my energies into correspond-
ing with an Equity actor I had only met once; and at the stage
door, for Christ s sake.
I SAW a production of Sweeney Todd right after Patrick moved
out, and fell for the guy in the lead role, all right? And I wasn t
critically appreciative from a safe blogging distance; I was blud-
geoned and ravaged into crazytown by this seemingly random
performer who shook me into fandom at an age closer to thirty
than twenty. It was embarrassing: I hadn t written love letters
to a celebrity since I put purple ballpoint to pink legal pad to
tell the actor who played Wesley how cute I thought he was in
the very special AIDS episode of Mr. Belvedere. And then there
were those humiliating incidents of me being way too into
sketch comedians in high school, confusing what I wanted to
be one day with who it might be fun to have sex with. If Dana
Carvey, whom I am certain is a fan of female-author-helmed
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I DON T CARE about YOUR BAND
dating memoirs, is reading this one, I just want to say, I hope
you weren t too freaked out by the birthday card I sent you
when I was fourteen, or allergic to the Opium brand perfume
it was marinated in, and also, while I m at it, I really liked
your performance as Pistachio Disguisey in the motion picture
Master of Disguises.
Only today, in the cool, Catskills-crisp air of retrospect, can
I now see that my fantasy-fueled correspondence with a Tony
Award winning triple-threat Demon Barber of Fleet Street
had its roots in a few different pots of batty soil.
People who love theater are often cynical, despite or maybe
because they know they re capable of being so moved by the
experience of watching a play that it feels better than real life.
But it wasn t enough for me to enjoy that guy s performance
the night I saw his show. For some reason, I had to read his bio,
find his website, get his e-mail, send him a note that dropped
the names of friends we had in common, and then, upon re-
ceiving a personal response, pore over every last word, inten-
tion, and emoticon until I had whipped my lady parts into a
meringue-like frenzy pie. What was I, Kathy Bates in Misery?
Or About Schmidt? Which was the one in which she was naked,
and which was the one in which she bludgeoned James Caan?
She lives out the fantasies of so many women, that Kathy Bates.
God bless and keep her!
Our e-mails weren t just an isolated incident of fan mail,
either. I had a good month or so of back-and-forthing with my
Broadway beau. Note this is a legal concern to add this, per
the request of the actor I m writing about. He d keep writing
back and I d keep putting myself out there: sending photos, invit-
ing him to rock shows, to coffee, stopping short of asking him
to shave and eat me. [Broadway Joke Alert!] I acted like a retard
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crazy is an std
tween, and this after two years of bitching about being with a
guy not as mature as I was.
But Sweeney kept hitting Reply, and he was as flirty as a
pleated skirt every time he wrote back. It s a no-brainer that ac-
tors have to flirt with everybody to maintain a level of success.
When your product is your own face, voice, and body, you need
to maintain a sense of charm and fuckability to make yourself
special beyond the sum of your parts in order to remain em-
ployed, even at the expense of the otherwise attractive assets you
might be lacking, like smarts or good jokes. But my critical filter
was as broken as the one on the humidifier I don t clean as I
pored over Sweeney s correspondences each morning, enlisting
a team of my most sympathetic friends on e-mail forward patrol,
designated to tell me things I wanted to hear, like He wants to
get together with you, it s just that his schedule is crazy, and
He signed it with an x ; that means he wants to kiss you. I d
think about him every night before sleeping, and wake up every
morning before peeing to run over to the computer and check
my inbox for the latest from Sweeney.
And all the while, I lived in the acupunctural tingle of an-
ticipation, hoping that one day we would go on a date in real
life, and that it would be as fantastic as it was when I saw that
show. Meanwhile, I did not go out on any actual dates.
Then, one day, I woke up, and there was no e-mail from
Sweeney. He stopped responding.
AS I mentioned before, I don t usually spiral into extended pe-
riods of delusional quasi-stalkery. So in an effort to map my
madness, I should mention another variable, besides Patrick s
moving out, that, at the time, didn t seem to have any connec-
tion to the blossoming romance in my mind.
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I DON T CARE about YOUR BAND
The day after I saw Sweeney Todd, and a week after Pat-
rick moved out, my father s mother, Adele, to whom I ge-
netically credit my inability to reasonably function anywhere
besides New York City, my exaggerated sense of stubborn self-
sufficiency, and my love of 70s clothing particularly the cowl
neck medallion pairing passed away, at home, after suffering
from a long illness.
The week after my grandmother s death, Patrick didn t call
me, visit my home, or write me to express his condolences, be-
cause, as he would later explain, he knew my family was sitting
shiva, and didn t know whether reaching out was in line with
the Jewish rite of mourning. (It is, in fact, sort of the point.)
Another culture gap was accumulated between me and ol Pat-
rick, and this time, it was a bigger deal than ham on a paper
plate in a basement.
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