I recently made a new friend, an occurrence that is unfailingly gratifying for the middle-aged, since the constant friction of life has an unfortunate way of robbing us of the old ones. People are forever dying or moving away or getting married, having children, and withdrawing into the increasingly private sphere of family life, and if you don’t continually replenish your reserve of friends, you’re likely to look up one day and find that you haven’t any.
In addition, it’s useful for all sorts of reciprocal reasons when those no longer young befriend those who still are. My quick-witted young friend (whom I first met, amazingly enough, on Twitter) happens to be exactly half my age, thus providing me with a window into the ever-mysterious world of Things as They Are Right Now, while I in turn give her case-hardened counsel on the ins and outs of the writer’s life.
We sealed our friendship yesterday over lunch at a downtown restaurant to which I hadn’t gone for years and years. “This is very nostalgic for me,” I told her. “I had my first editorial lunch in Manhattan at this place, back when I worked at Harper’s. It would have been in…oh, 1985. That was when you were in kindergarten.”
“That was when I was in diapers,” she retorted instantly, which turned out to be all the more embarrassing because it was true.
Speaking of embarrassment, my friend and I decided that one of the most effective ways to cement a friendship is by swapping embarrassing confidences, which we proceeded to do while waiting for the check to arrive. (I think we came out roughly even.) After I returned home, we exchanged the following messages via Twitter:
SHE The most positive relationships in my life are built on foundations of voluntarily disclosed humiliation.
ME It’s like exchanging hostages.
SHE Aaaaaaaaaaaand I just laughed out loud at my desk like a little nimrod. Terry, for the win.
I felt positively sprightly, as though I’d done a figure-eight in my wheelchair.
Let’s go back to the movie for a moment. Released in 1994, “The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert” told of how three drag queens, one of them an aging transsexual played, amazingly enough, by Terence Stamp, traveled across the Australian desert in a rundown motor home, looking for love in all the wrong places. Despite a few overly obvious moments, it was a modest and poignant film not unworthy of “La Cage aux Folles,” by which it was clearly inspired, and has since become something of a cult classic.
Plays, unlike novels, do get written that fast–sometimes. Noël Coward wrote the first draft of Private Lives in four days, though he spent a week and a half sketching out the plot before sitting down to write the dialogue. I’m not Noël Coward, needless to say, but it took me about that long to write the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf last winter, and I was so surprised by the quickness with which it took shape that quite some time went by before I could be persuaded that it might possibly be anything other than lousy. “Don’t worry,” a very experienced playwright told me a few weeks later. “With a play, that kind of speed can be a good sign, proof of inspiration.”