Our Little Girl Is All Grown Up

I was on the train, the “L,” sending text messages to update my progress towards our meeting point. The journey was a bit crazy, take the hotel shuttle to the “Yellow Line,” then the “Yellow Line” to the Howard stop, then change trains at Howard to the “Red Line” or the “Purple Line” depending on the time of day. Of course when I started out to do this the first night I do not know all of this and when I got to Howard I got off the train because it liked like the station in Evanston from what I remembered.

I started out excited to see her, and then I started to get frustrated, then angry, as I was wondering around trying to figure out where I was. If I hadn’t been so steamed I would have found it funny that I walked for almost half an hour before winding up at the exact door that I had come out of when I first reached the Howard station. I re-entered and asked the question and then climbed the stairs back up to the platform to make my way North.

When I finally reached the “Davis” stop in Evanston, I called and began the modern day human equivalent of the homing pigeon. “Where are you?” “I am outside Barnes and Nobles. Where are you?” “I am just leaving the station I will be there in a minute.” “Can you see me?” “No not yet, can you see me?” Cell phones, and all the other technology, have turned us all into morons.

Finally I saw her and said “I see you I will be right there.” I could not believe my eyes. There was this five foot seven inch, blond haired, blue eyed actress standing at the end of the block outside the entrance to Barnes and Nobles. She looked confident, happy, mature. She had that layered thing going on that actresses do, with the t-shirt and the vest and the button down over the top. She also had the wrap around scarf thing happening. There is no way this was my seventeen year old sister!!

She is twenty nine years younger than I am, and until this week she has always been a little kid. Not anymore. I gave her a hug. She called her friends to find out where they were. We walked a block to a PUB where they were having dinner. She introduced me to all of them, including her boyfriend, the boyfriend part I figured out later. I met her director. It was all so strange.

We then went out to a restaurant and sat down and had dinner together. This is the first time we ever did this. We had a conversation. We laughed. We joked. We enjoyed each other’s company and we were at ease together. I then walked her back to the theatre to meet her friends and made my way back to the hotel.

The next afternoon I shaved, showered and put my fancy duds on. Met a friend outside the hotel and we walked our way over to the theatre once again, this time to see her matinee performance. This was an “ensemble” show that had been five weeks in the making. This was a very talented group of fourteen actors working as one, actually all playing the same women over the course of an hour. This play was beautifully and cleverly written, adequately directed, and superbly acted by all. This was not the community theatre bit part stuff I had last seen her in; this was a theatre production of the Northwestern University Theatre department. In the three years I had been away she had become an actor, or as she prefers, actress, and a very talented one at that.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.