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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

If you�ve ever enjoyed my writing, please donate to the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis and/or the Montel Williams MS Foundation.

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