but with some of my best lady friends, well, they're like sisters to me!
SYN,
So true!. A woman I had befriended some years ago asked me if I'd like to help out with the local amateur theatre group she'd belonged to for years. She showed me some photos and they'd done some pretty elaborate productions, musicals even. I said yes.
I was doing set construction for Niel Simon's "Barefoot in the Park" and the stage had to go up in one day. A lot of late sixties era pieces had been sourced that made my job quite a bit easier than it might have been but one piece that was not found was an old style steam radiator. Not just an adornment, the lack of heat is refered to in the play, and the radiator gets a thwack from one of the actors.
As the art director my friend asked me to just build a floor-standing 3 inch projection from the wall, 2 feet wide and 3 feet tall. I screwed the thing together from 2x2's and covered it in theatre 'skins'. (Imagine plywood made from just two plys and with canvas glued on the good side. Reused a hundred times the paint coats are sometimes thicker that the material itself.) As I stood back to admire my work, my chin hit my chest, "There's no way this looks like a steam radiator," I thought to myself, " It's just a crude box."
Even as I was wrapping up my extension cord, my friend moved in with her cart of paint and brushes. She started with a pencil and no more that thirty minutes later, she stood back to admire her work. And there it was, a trompe d'loile masterpiece. A steam heat radiator stood where I had left a crude box. To say that I was impressed with her at that moment is far too mild.
Later that night when she dropped me off, I invited her in for some tea. My place was vey small, nothing more than a cabin by the sea. Other than my tiny kitchen table, my only seating area was my bed, and that is where we ended up, sitting together on the end of my bed. The conversation took a turn, I leaned in, she leaned in, our lips touched, our arms came up to hold each other and we slowly fell back into my bed. And then we both started to smirk, our arms parted and we rolled away from each other to lie on our backs and talk to the ceiling.
"Did that seem just way too wrong?" I asked.
"What just happened there? Something should have happened, but it felt like I've just kissed my brother."
"Me too. But not my brother, of course, you have smoother skin. More like my sister."
Silly laughter.
"Well maybe we are brother and sister, but reincarnated." She said, sitting back up.
Not a believer in such things, I sat up and said, "Well it may be something like that. See you for dress rehearsal tommorrow?"
"Pick you up at five, no later" She said but made no move to leave.
We talked through the night and only slept a few hours, in my bed, clothed, and holding hands.
Eric
