I had known her as a friend in college for a few years now. She was an odd dichotomy of personality traits. As mentioned before, she had a smoldering sexuality to her, yet she had an incredibly innocent approach to life. She had more interpersonal experiences with others than anyone else I knew, yet was incredibly loyal to her boyfriend, Dave. She was very spiritual, yet without being religious. She, like everyone else, was far more complex and layered than she first appeared.
Since I was coming from a relatively sheltered background, her unique and different view on life was intriguing to me. Peeling back those personality layers would end up being an interesting and, at times, very frustrating experience.
Our bodies not yet stiff from the limited body placement options in the small back seat, Sunday and I quickly made ourselves comfortable, resting our heads against our pillows propped up against the back seat windows. Our initial conversation covered a lot of ground. Our families, our college experience, our past relationships, other people in the theater department… stuff like that.
One of the odd things about acting is the uncommon intimacy that is required to do the job. There were many times during my college years where, during a scene, I had to kiss or hold or touch a fellow actress as part of a scene... often times with people I barely knew. It creates a unique dynamic. I had kissed girls that I only knew in passing. I had allowed numerous actresses into the intimate three foot bubble that surrounds us all, our personal space, in order to fulfill the dramatic necessities of a scene. That's the nature of being an actor, but an odd existence for everyone else.
Leslie and Pete in The TempestFor a young, virile college male, it was both fun and confusing. For someone who never dated in high school and who was too shy and insecure to ask anyone to his prom, being paired in acting class with a beautiful girl whom, in real life, you would barely have the courage to talk to, and being assigned a scene in which you had to kiss this beautiful girl... well, let's be honest, that was frickin' cool! I mean, you got to kiss girls you didn't think would give you the time of day. And they had to kiss you back! It was in the scene! Their grade depended on it! It was every young man's dream in a lot of ways.
Overall, it was an odd convergence of fantasy and reality and it ended up creating an almost false sense of closeness amongst our class. By the time we were all graduating, it was like a sitcom that lasts too long... eventually, everyone had kissed everyone else. That sort of intimacy is not something to which you can naturally disengage, yet it is a shallow intimacy, so it is not something to which you can wholly grasp onto... it's somewhere in between. It's... weird.
So, as Sunday and I discussed our classmates, the conversation eventually ended up in the "who did you want to kiss but never did" or "who did you kiss and wish you didn't" realm. The strangest part of this conversation was that, as part of a short film I had written and directed, Sunday and I had already made out... on camera.
Sunday and Pete in Homesick...They're acting... really!
You'll have to trust me, it was unnatural and completely unromantic.
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