Our Dramatic Process class met evenings
that winter, Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the black nights
and blowing snow we learned the most efficient ways to disappear
into fiction, to become someone else. We learned
movement exercises, vocal techniques. We ghosted
through crowds, named strangers, told their stories. We learned
Stanislavski and Strasberg. We learned to lie without speaking.
Some of us would meet for drinks after class, we four
who had little to go home to, or nothing. We’d meet
in bars or at pubs, sometimes restaurants, a café once:
anywhere with dark corners to claim, to occupy. We’d drink
through the night and talk—about childhood and sex,
about school, about television and God. We’d talk about time,
and fear of death, and the gaps we kept finding in our lives.
In March we learned about Meisner and the moment,
and after five months in Berlin, Sarah’s girlfriend met someone else
and decided to stay. My latest love affair ended, badly.
Joanne’s boyfriend moved out. Wendy’s divorce was finalized
on her twenty-third birthday. We drank in silence that week, isolates
in our own aching guts. We had no system, no method
for this. We had never learned.
With her fourth vodka tonic (shimmering in the light
from the bar), Wendy toasted to solitude. We nodded, grim,
and drank. Sarah toasted to caution—no, cynicism, to cynicism;
we drank. Joanne toasted to casual sex; we laughed bitterly
and drank. Then my turn. To the moment, I said, and set my jaw.
Catcalls, loud and sudden, from a distant table—a birthday.
Dishes crashed behind us in the kitchen. We drank.
Wendy went home with Sarah that night, giggling nastily
in her ear. Joanne and I fed loonies to the jukebox
until last call, called two taxis, and went home
to cats and alarm clocks and empty beds.