The Year of Magical Thinking

It’s always great to have a great friend who can get you damn good seats at a show. Thanks Martha! Martha is the girlfriend of my best friend, Megan. They hooked up a couple of years ago. By pure coincidence (since Martha is from California and Megan and I are from New York), it turns out that Martha actually went to our high school for two years before she moved to California. They did not know this before they hooked up. I was friends with her brother.

So, Martha moved to California and then came back to New York, eventually. And I moved to California from New York and now I mostly live in California and spend about six or eight weeks each year in New York. And Megan lives in New York but would like to have a desert house in California. And The Year of Magical Thinking, starring Vanessa Redgrave, written by Joan Didion based on her book, is about a woman who sallies between New York and California as she deals with the death of her husband and her daughter.

Most of you have read the book or at least heard of it. Fabulous book. The play was the book, simply shared. It was hard for me to just experience the play as a play since I know the book so well. But Vanessa Redgrave was luminous, as always. And actually, the whole time she was up there I kept thinking, oddly, that she was, in fact, Joan Didion and I thought, “I hope when the play is over I get to meet her,” meaning Joan Didion. But what I really should have been thinking was Vanessa Redgrave, not Joan Didion. I was also stuffed with hot open turkey sandwich (Hi Todd).

Well, after the play was over, I did go backstage and sat at a little café table called “Café Didion”—a little resting area for Joan (the real one) to sit during rehearsals...maybe for Vanessa, too. In any event, I sat there while Martha was finishing up her work and as the small crew and cast of one were exiting, singing en masse something from West Side Story, they walked right by and Martha introduced me to Vanessa Redgrave. Quick, simple chat. But nice to have had it. Martha and I stood on the stage of the Booth Theatre looking out at the empty seats. It’s nice to stand on a Broadway stage. Ghost light. Has that promising, expansive feeling.

Martha and I went back to her place, (an amazing new apartment on the twenty-fourth floor of Manhattan Plaza with a river view practically out to Pennsylvania) and we drank white wine with ice and yakked.