Journal of a Sabbatical

September 3, 1998

an odd encounter

Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan

An actor talked my ear off for nearly an hour this afternoon. In fact it may have been longer than that - my watch is broken. He seemed OK at first, in fact I thought he was a school friend of two of the baristas at Starbucks because he acted like an old friend. Only later did I find out they'd just met him too.

I first noticed him sitting at the counter reading Hamlet. Not everybody reads Hamlet these days. I overheard him saying something about working on his monologue to Kirsten (one of the baristas) and I must have looked up and made eye contact out of curiosity. That was all it took.

He asked what I was reading (Spartina by John Casey) and went on from there telling me all about how he practices his Hamlet while working on the fine brickwork of the historic buildings he's renovating for the summer. Then he launched into how tired he gets when he has to do multiple takes of a film scene and how he's directing a film about the messiah in which he plays Matthew the tax collector. He gave a whole mini performance of Matthew catching the apostles fishing and trying to soak them for all the tax money he can get out of them. Somehow this led to how he wants to stage The Adding Machine in the new courthouse building in Boston because it's so over scaled. And he's negotiating to build an "arts emporium" in South Boston on the site where the proposed (but failed) football stadium was going to be. I heard all about how much real estate like that rents for, the fund raising pitch for each corporate patron he was soliciting (in detail), trademarking, how to hang art, the design for the film room. This guy could have been talking to a wall or a mirror or a post, rather than to me. I felt completely irrelevant to his monologue.

At some point I began to realize he couldn't possibly pull off all the things he was talking about. That was at about the same time I realized that his performance as Matthew had seemed an awful lot like his Hamlet, and his corporate pitches sounded exactly like Matthew. His eyes looked unnaturally bright to me and his speech was way too animated after only one cup of coffee. He just kept on talking and I kept on listening, mesmerized.

I felt like I was pinned down, couldn't get away, had to listen to every detail of his grandiose plans. The "my parking meter is about to run out" excuse to end it didn't seem like it would work somehow. I had this image in my head of his following me to the car while I put another quarter in the meter or something. Finally, I told him the historical society was still looking for male actors for the upcoming play about the Andover witch trials. They didn't get enough guys at the audition for all the male parts. He actually seemed knowledgeable about the Andover witches (more witches were accused in Andover than in Salem). So I repeated that they needed guys for the male roles and convinced him to head over to the historical society. Which he did, at last.

My meter was expired when I got to my car, but I didn't have a ticket. Just lucky I guess.