2007-10-31 - 1:38 p.m.
On Halloween 1994, I went to a party at Emerson College. It’s in downtown Boston and my friend invited me to a shindig being thrown by his cousin who went there. Emerson is a top performing arts school and graduates a lot of people you know (Sex in the City’s Mario Cantone, actress Gina Gershon, comedians Bobcat Goldthwaite and Dennis Leary and Steven Wright, and monologueist Spalding Grey among them).
I was excited to go to a theater-school event. I’d acted a lot at Saint Ann’s and in college. (Eventually I’d go on to a lead role in an indie movie and work in film as an art director, but none of this had happened yet.) Theater parties were a lot of fun and I’d always enjoyed them (even when I failed to close the deal, so to speak). I can’t remember what costume I wore, but I often dressed as a monk back then, with a button saying “May the Force Be with You”.
When we got to the party, apparently some of the other guests had already been told that we were from Harvard. This has a peculiar resonance (even around other Boston-area colleges) as meaning you’re some know-it-all nerd. So after we’d had a few beers and I approached another guest I found particularly attractive, she immediately started grilling me.
“So who am I, huh? What’s my costume?”
“Uhm. I don’t know.”
“Come on, I thought you Harvard boys were supposed to be smart! I’ll give you a hint: I’m a painting. British, nineteenth-century!”
Oh man. I’d always been pretty weak on visual art…
“I’m sorry, I can’t even guess.”
“I’m The Lady of Shallot by John William Waterhouse!”
Oof. I tried to recover.
“I’m sorry, you caught me in my weak spot.”
“Hmph. Well, it goes to show. You can always tell a Harvard boy, but you can’t tell him much…”
“Look, I’m trying to make good here. Help me out. Let’s see: what’s your major?”
She eyed me skeptically before responding. “Musical theater.”
“Cool. I used to do a lot of acting to in high school. A little now in college. Of course, Harvard doesn’t have a big theater scene like here.”
Another girl came up to us and brought the girl I was talking with a cup of punch.
“Thanks,” my interlocutor said to the new girl. “This is my roommate,” she said to me.
“Hey,” I nodded. Okay, I still needed to impress this girl who had caught me short. I could talk about theater. “So, do you do plays here?”
“Yeah, I’ve been in plays here and I’ve also done a few student films. That’s what I really want to get into, screen acting.”
Screen acting. Wait a minute, she looked like some actress. But who?
“Well, you certainly have the face for it,” I heard myself saying. Shit, this beer is making me too forward. Still, maybe flattery will get me everywhere. “In fact, you look just like some actress I can’t think of…”
“Meg Ryan?” said the roommate.
“Yes, that’s it exactly!”
I scrutinized her face. Yes, pretty and blond. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to her.
“Well,” said her roommate. “That’s because she’s Meg Ryan’s daughter.”
My jaw dropped in astonishment. “Wow, really?” I heard myself saying, again against my better judgment. Famous people’s kids went to Harvard too. As I learned when I met the Prince of Denmark my freshman year and made a joke about him being named ‘Hamlet’, it was bad form to make a big deal out of it.
She stormed off in a huff. I went after her and spent the rest of the night trying to recover. I never did. Of course, I never made any progress on the romantic front and certainly didn’t close the deal. I went back to my dorm with my friends, drunk and alone. Wait a second, it occurred to me in a brief moment of clarity through my brooding. How could Meg Ryan have a daughter? She was still relatively young.
It would have had to be a teen pregnancy. While this is certainly possible, it’s unlikely you’d be able to start a successful film career with a child to take care of. I wandered over to my dorm’s computer lab and got on the nascent World Wide Web. A search for Meg Ryan’s biography (on Hotbot or whatever it was I used in the pre-Google days) did not reveal Meg Ryan had any children. Now, maybe she’d kept giving birth a hush-hush secret. But somehow I didn’t think so.
I suspected I’d been had. Deeply and mercilessly. Aw, man. What had she gotten out of it? Not romance or even impressing anyone with any power over her life. But then I realized: she had successfully put one over on someone she maybe felt was going to a “better” school than she was (even though it really wasn’t).
So here’s to that girl from Emerson. I can’t even remember your name now. But you got me so good thirteen years ago that I still remember it.
© 2007 Geoff Gladstone
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