Sharon Goldberg
So my partner Arnie and I are at Caadxi Mexican restaurant, our regular Friday night spot, and I’m sipping my second margarita—strong, on the rocks, no salt—and feeling lightheaded and loose when I notice the couple with their two young boys at the table next to us—she’s pudgy, tattooed with a nose ring and he’s dark-brown-haired with a scruffy beard—and I’m thinking they’re millennial and edgy and maybe blue collar and have nothing in common with us and our Uffizi-visiting, Heather Cox Richardson-following, Baby Boomer friends, but I eavesdrop on their conversation anyway (she does most of the talking) and hear “New York City” and “theater” and “Broadway” and “London” and “West End” and suddenly I am very interested in them, and when she pauses, I take another sip of margarita and say, “I’m sorry, I overheard your conversation, and I don’t mean to be nosy but do you work in theatre?” and she says yes and she’s acting in a local show, on stage for the first time since the pandemic, but she’s also a union stage manager at Seattle Rep, and she directs, too, and at this I say, “Wow!” as Arnie focuses on his tortilla soup, theatre not his métier, then feeling nostalgic, I proceed to riff about my former life as an actress in LA—stage, student-films, showcases—not mentioning that my net acting income was $620, and adding that I can’t imagine acting now because I don’t have enough brain cells left to memorize lines, and we laugh and she tells us the cast had their first read-through of the play and it was giddy and glorious to get back to live performance after all that time and I say it’s great that you can do all these different theatrical things, and he chimes in (oh good, he speaks!) to say you have to work backstage to make a living in theatre, and I nod in agreement, and then I go back to my cheese quesadilla and margarita and they talk to their well-behaved boys who quietly eat their tacos, but later, the margaritas having totally obliterated any remaining filter, I nose in again and ask the man if he’s a backstage person, too, and he says he’s a software engineer, and I’m thinking that he and Arnie have technology in common, but Arnie munches a tortilla chip and still doesn’t join the conversation, and I ask if he’s independent or if he works for one of the megacompanies, and he says he just joined a startup, gaming, and I say great, and, he says, he worked for Microsoft for 20 years, and I think, no wonder she can afford to work in theatre, and I go back to my remaining rice and beans and noisily suck the last of the margarita through a straw and then I remember I’ve read that in order to meet new people and broaden your social circle (which I’d like to do even though I adore my Baby Boomer friends) you need to take chances, reach out, risk rejection, so I say, “I’ve never done this before, but you both seem so interesting, and would you like to get together sometime?” and he pauses a beat, then says, “Well, we’re very child focused now, but. . .” and I don’t take the hint and ask if he has a card, realizing I’ve just shown what a fossil I am, and he blandly asks what’s the best way to be in touch and I say email and he gives me his address, and I email it to myself and say I’m Sharon and this is Arnie (who says nothing) and he says, John and Maggie, and acknowledging their parenthood, I ask how old their kids are—ten and eight—and after a while they get up to leave and say nice meeting you, and I grin but my buzz is starting to wear off and I already sense that I was pushy and they were just being polite and are hoping I don’t email and they won’t run into us again at Caadxi and if I do email they’ll say they’re busy or ghost me, and Arnie is likely thinking that this is what happens when Sharon drinks margaritas and talks and talks and talks, and now I’m feeling like I felt thirty years ago when I was a struggling actress and put myself out there and auditioned and auditioned and auditioned for director after director after director and, most of the time, the response was a polite smile, a cursory thank-you, and one more closed door.
#
Sharon Goldberg is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Citron Review, New Letters, The Louisville Review, Cold Mountain Review, River Teeth, Green Mountains Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Sharon won second place in the On the Premises 2012 Humor Contest and Fiction Attic Press’s 2013 Flash in the Attic Contest. She is an avid but cautious skier and enthusiastic world traveler.