I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

My latest writing prompt:

Write about a door you’ve walked through that you can’t go back through.

I got this suggestion a week ago and I’ve thought about it a lot, but I keep coming back to the same story. Every time.

In 2007, I spent the summer in Tulsa, Oklahoma designing the lights for The Music Man, Naughty Marietta, and Sweeney Todd. It was an adventure to say the least. I was sleeping in a dorm room, with a roommate, and at 42, it was weird as fuck.

I was doing summer stock, 20 years after I should have been doing summer stock. That being said, as everyone I’ve ever spoken to about summer theater, it was wonderful and terrible all at the same time.

The lead actors in the shows, that played in rep, were all professionals. They were all incredibly talented. The choruses were mostly made up of college kids, who were doing their first professional gigs. I can say that a lot of the people I worked with there have gone on to bigger careers, whether performing, directing or designing.

Eric who ran the theater company, and directed the show, was very creative, and the shows were always a little outside the norm, which made them fun to do. For example, for Sweeney, we pulled all the masking, and upstage soft goods and performed the show on scaffolding in front of a dramatic upstage concrete wall.

The work was fast and furious. The rehearsal period short, tech even shorter. I wrote 400 cues for Sweeney in about 4 hours. At the end of every break, it was like someone fired a starter pistol, and I was now sprinting toward the finish line. Looking back, there are lots of things I would change, but it in the moment, it just felt good to get it where we got it.

The highlight of my summer there was meeting Kelly Irwin. She was the production stage manager, and we became fast friends. Probably because, well not probably, we were the adults in the room. All of the lead actors were housed in donor homes, while the chorus, crew and designers were housed in a dorm. It was Kelly who reminded people to stop drinking and go to bed. It was Kelly, who demanded we all hide in the bathroom during the torrential thunderstorms we got that summer when the tornado sirens were sounding.

Kelly and I spent many nights hiding in her dorm room decompressing from the day. Sometimes this involved drinking. Sometimes vodka.

Fun fact: The evening I’m about to describe, was the second to last night I ever drank vodka. It was bad news. The last time was even worse, a year later. I NEVER drink it now.

On the night in question, Kelly and I hid. And in the process, we began to talk. About our lives. About our professions. About the summer. At one point, it turned to families, and then death and dying.

And then something clicked and we began to talk about become a member of the dead parent club. My father had died four summers prior, her mom the summer before. And we went down a deep, melancholy rabbit hole, and stayed there until around 4:00 a.m.

Ultimately, what we decided was that it’s a door no one wants to walk thru, but that most of us will walk thru at some point in our lives. We don’t think about the mortality of our parents when we are young. They are fixtures in our lives, fixtures that will be there forever.

Then your grandparents fade away. And one day you wake up and realize that when you thought your parents were old, they weren’t. Now that you are in your 40’s they are getting older and much frailer. The summer of my 20-year high school reunion, I had at least three friends, including myself who lost parents that summer.

I can still remember getting the call that my dad had passed. It was quick. It was sudden. One minute he was there. Next minute he wasn’t.

And this is what Kelly and I delved into that fateful night. It was a club that no one wants to belong to, but is inevitable, if you make it yourself. Looking back, I don’t remember for sure, but it might have been the night of the one year anniversary of Kelly’s mom dying.

It’s been almost 20 years since that summer. I’m in the orphan stage now. Both of my parents are gone. That’s even weirder door to walk thru. There is no one to call on Sunday night to talk about the weather. There is no one to call who can update you on the family drama. And suddenly you are alone in keeping the family stories alive.

I know all of this is life. It’s the reality of growing old, for those of us lucky enough to grow old. Once you get that phone call, saying “they’re gone,” there is no going back. It changes you forever, regardless of your relationship with said parent.

So I sit here, reminiscing about that summer. Pete. Travis. Eric. Ron. Brian. Supreet. Jenna. Kyle. Andrea. So many memories. I signed up for Facebook that summer. My first photo was of a bar that we’d been in earlier in the night. I had no idea what Facebook was, but I was able to sign up since my UCSD email address was still valid. We all stayed in touch for a while after that summer. Kelly moved to NYC and we hung out. Others I’d text. Most of them I followed on Facebook, till they moved on or my political posts drove them away. I still like to see what those that remain are up to. Some getting married. Buying houses. Directing shows. Performing on well-regarded stages. Designing beautiful shows. It’s still nice to know they are out there. They were a great group of people.

The two summers that I spent there changed my life. All for the better, although I might not have said that at the time. I’m proud of my work there, and the friends that I made. And the talk filled night with Kelly, is still one of the special nights of my life.