The evening of Wednesday, 03/14/84, the NYC theatre tour group was scheduled to see an Off-Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons. It was "Isn't It Romantic?" by up and coming playwright Wendy Wasserstein. While it had a small but decent-sized stage, the seating consisted of regular single chairs on a flat floor.
Cristine Rose was in the original cast and she seemed to be playing a idealized version of Wasserstein. She portrayed a 30-year-old woman who was living on her own, but still could not get her parents out of her life. (This is a rather simplified synopsis.) She was really funny and endearing to watch in the play.
Outside in the lobby, there was a table with these postcards on it. The cards said that the cast and crew would be attending a special event that evening at someplace called The Heartbreak. The cards gave the address and said that the admission would be $15. I decided I wanted to go to that. After the performance, we got back to the hotel. It was after 11pm. I didn't have any cash to pay the $15 and cab fare, so I grabbed a traveler's check and went down to the lobby cashier. They had closed their bank for the night. I went out to a couple of nearby hotels and ran into the same problem. No one had any money to give me $50 in exchange for a check. I went back to my hotel and knocked on Dr. W's door. He opened it and seemed a little surprised to see me. I asked him if he could loan me $40 until I could cash a check the next day. I told him what I was going to do. I was actually surprised that he reached into his wallet and handed me two $20 bills.
I ran out and got a taxi. Since it was a weeknight, traffic was rather light and we got to the Heartbreak relatively quickly. When I got to the destination, I realized it was this huge nightclub. There was a line of people outside waiting to get in. I went up to the doorman and showed him the postcard from the theatre. He handed me a business-sized card with The Heartbreak's logo. He opened the door and told me to take that card to the window. I went up and handed the cashier the card. I started to give her a $20 bill for the admission, but she told me that I got in free with that small card. SCORE!
As I approached the main dance floor, the thought suddenly occurred to me that this might be a gay night club. The moment I completed that thought, this big burly guy in a white shirt grabbed me by the wrist! I thought he was going to say something like, "Come on, sweetie, let's dance!" I envisioned myself screaming at the top of my lungs. The next thing I knew, he took a rubber stamp and stamped the back of my hand and let go. "That's so you can get back in if you leave." "Oh, thanks."
The first thing I set about doing was trying to find the cast and crew from "Isn't It Romantic." It was after midnight at this point and I was afraid that they had already left. I looked around and I saw Cristine Rose sitting in a chair and she was surrounded by a couple of other people I had seen in the production. Asperger Syndrome be damned, I approached her and asked if she wanted to dance with me. She had a shocked look on her face. She quickly looked at the people surrounding her. Then she smiled and said, "Why not?" We took to the floor. A few seconds later, a couple of the other cast members joined us. The song ended and then an early Beatles song came on. She acted like a 13-year-old girl in the midst of Beatlemania and started screaming. (She was 33 in 1984, so yes, she would have experienced this first hand.) We danced to this song as well. After the song was over, I whispered in her ear that I had enjoyed her performance earlier that evening. She probably wasn't aware I had been in the audience that night and probably realized then why I randomly came up and asked her to dance. (I should also add that neither of the songs we danced to were slow ones, so there was no actual physical contact.)
I was very excited about what had just transpired, but I wasn't ready to go home yet. I decided to try to get a dance with any woman at the club I could get to dance with me. (I was so not there to pick up someone to go out for a one-night stand.) And as easy as it was to get Cristine Rose to dance with me, it was dang near impossible to find another girl willing to go to the floor with me. Twice, I had women tell me, "No, I'm going to go dance with her." This shocked me the first time it happened, but I saw that they weren't lesbians, they just enjoyed taking to the dance floor with their female friends.
I did succeed in getting one woman to dance with me. It was Michael Jackson's "Thriller," and it was nice because the DJ played the full-length album version, which meant we got to dance for more than five minutes. I thanked the woman for dancing with me and never spoke to her again. I had accomplished all I had set out to do and I had another full day for Thursday. All the way back, the cab kept hitting green lights. That probably saved me a few dollars.
Later that summer, I was randomly watching TV one night. A program titled "Love Long Distance" came on. It was apparent that it was a TV pilot that didn't get picked up. Normally, I wouldn't have watched it, but I saw Cristine Rose's name in the opening credist. Oh, I had to watch this. The premise of the show was this young married couple who had to spend their weekdays apart at their jobs, but got together on the weekends. Cristine Rose played the wife's weekday roommate. She was really funny, but the show didn't look like the writers would be able to come up with any more amusing stories that didn't involve the couple trying to go out in the middle of the week and surprise the other only to find out the other one did the same thing at the same time.
This was something that would continue throughout my life. I would always see her making guest appearances on TV shows. She was actually a very hard-working actress. And if I was watching something with someone else and she was on it, I would always bring up the fact that I had gotten to dance with her. And it was thrilling to see her get more notice on the show "Heroes."
And I have always wondered, in the event that I ran into her signing autographs somewhere like Comic-Con, if she would remember me once I jogged her memory. I may never find out. After all, it was more than 30 years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment