Perfect Connections
I am in Montreal for the weekend visiting my brother Joel and some old friends. Among my brother’s many talents, he is also an actor. For the next two weeks he is playing Pistol in Henry V. Such fun watching him pull of a Cockney accent. I admit it is hard to watch him and not this “that is my baby brother up there.”
Yesterday was full of serendipitous moments. After a week where things just appeared to be out of sync, it felt as if I had hit Stop, Reset and Play; moving in a new direction where everything was connecting in a perfect symmetry. I think the idea is remembering that when things are out of sync, they are connecting perfectly even then.
My friend Andrea Lindsay stayed over in the hotel with me and we had a slumber party. In the morning, she turned on Musi-Max (the French music station in Quebec) and her video was on the countdown!
How wonderful it was to share that moment with her. We often talk about this evening about eight years ago. We were working retail at the Chapters where we met and I hadn’t finished my Masters Degree #1 yet and she was figuring out how to get her music career started. That evening is mythical for us. We are sitting on the park bench drinking Dep (Convenience Store) wine out of Dollar Store cups telling the universe what we wanted. And there it was on the TV screen eight years later. Her dream in action.
Given the work that I would like to do in Masters Degree #2 and the fact that in two weeks I’m going on a road trip to Michigan to see the Laura Ingalls Wilder exhibit, how cosmic was it that upon looking at the @indigogreenroom’s Twitter feed yesterday morning, and discovered that Melissa Sue Anderson, who played Mary Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie (LHOTP,) was going to be speaking about her new book at the Chapters in Pointe Claire.
Now, the other funny thing was that Andrea and I had been talking about her and Andrea was saying that she believed that Ms. Anderson lived around Montreal. What were the chances of me being an hour away from where she would be? I figured that my literary road trip was starting early.
My good friend L said that he would drive me. And another good friend manages the store so I could see him as well. Ms. Anderson was gracious and down-to-earth. She read about studying to play a blind person. And, as parts of her book is set up like a television script, she had people come up to play certain roles. I was suddenly overcome in a bout of shyness so I didn’t go up. I so should have.
I wonder what LHOTP geeks are called?
For the girl who sat on the bench with a cup of cheap wine in her hand, the short drive to Point Claire certainly cemented for her, things to come. And, later, when her old professor and mentor gave her a beautiful used copy of a Joan of Arc children’s book from the 1920s (the topic of Masters Degree #1) it felt like the road to yesterday connected to the now and the potential of what was to come.
