Anna

I haven't told you about Anna, my cousin by way of my mother's grandmother's half-sister.  She found, located and contacted me herself, I didn't know of her existence, and my mother had by then passed away.. This was before Internet, you wonder how people managed to find one another; nowadays my unique name is stored in thousands of databases out there, and no one finds, locates or contacts me.

Anna was living alone in the city at the time and seeking a companion outside of her professional circle.  I happened to fit the bill.  She was an actress rehearsing a stage play, and she talked the director into allowing me to sit in on the rehearsals.   I started coming on my free days, sitting quiet as a church mouse in the last row of the auditorium, until the director asked me to move in closer and I sat in the row behind him and his assistant.  The play was an obscure melodrama from the 1930s that he decided to modernize, saying that its themes were universal and always up to date.  That was certainly true, but these themes got lost in the fog of archaic dialogue and bourgeois sensibilities of its age.  That is at least what  I thought without ever saying so to anyone.

The director would occasionally turn around and ask "Whadya think?" or "Howz that look?", and I'd answer, "Fine", "Looks good", until I discerned that such answers were insufficient and unsatisfactory to him, and then I'd try to say the same thing, saying nothing,  only in  longer sentences.  During one scene he had the main male character stand and speak with his back to the audience, much to the protests of the actors, which he ignored, and following the premiere, criticisms of the critics, which he considered before deciding to change the staging of the mis en scen.

Anna played the female lead, did an exceptional job, recognized by everyone, which led to an offer for a screen test from Hollywood, and small roles in films being shot here (without screen tests!)  She was happy, we spent much time together, in a non-committal but intimate relationship.  I'd have married her, but the rules were rules and "we can't marry, we're cousins!", she insisted.  She was strong but also very sensitive.  There were times when after a rehearsal she would come to me crying, not as a result of some conflict or disagreement, but out of the intensity of her work.  I hugged and comforter her. So that's what my role was there.

Then something bad happened. (Would I be telling this story if nothing bad happened?)  The play ends with the character played by Anna shooting her stage husband.  (And the gun doesn't even appear as in Chekhov until then.)  On the last day of the run which lasted six months, the gun that Anna fired had a live bullet instead of a blank.  Panic, pandemonium, ambulances, shouts, tears, police.   The actor survived in the end, but in the meantime police had to investigate.  Anna was in shock.  Naturally, she was a so-called 'person of interest' at first, though this didn't last more than a few days, she had no motive.  It turned out, soon enough, that the actor's recently divorced wife talked a stage hand, the prop man, into exchanging the guns, paid him $1000 which was almost a princely sum at the time, and helped him arrange a suitable alibi.   The scheme was ridiculously amateurish, and the pair ended up in prison for a good stretch of time.

Anna in the meantime couldn't recover from the experience.  She blamed herself for not noting that the prop gun had been switched,  she gave up on the promising Hollywood career, packed her things and moved back with her mother in France - she had a dual citizenship.   Other than once a year Christmas cards I haven't heard from her.