Reach Out and Touch

Dreams, telephones, and to-do lists all converged this week around an old friend.


First the backstory (gotta have a backstory): I hate telephones. I really, really hate to call people. I'll do it if I have to but most of the time I prefer to e mail or I make someone else do it. When an actor is late, I have my assistant call him or her. I tell myself that I need to be free in case the director needs me. I tell myself a lot of things.
I see people on their cell phones all the time and I wonder who they could possibly be talking to. My son attended a birthday party and I watched the mom of the birthday boy chat on her cell phone while the cake was being served. I don't get it.

So, all this past week I've been having really vivid dreams. The kind that when you wake up, you're not sure if it's real or not. In one dream, I was writing a list of things to do when I had 5 minutes of spare time. You know, when the water is boiling, waiting for the microwave or the kids to come home. I'm a bit anal about time management which makes for a good stage manager but probably annoys everyone else in my real life. Well, the idea of such a to-do list sounded so good that I wrote one up. It had practical items such as file, clean the utensil drawer and personal items like update my iPod, catch up on blogs, etc.

Another night, I dreamt about an old friend of mine from college. We're close and we try hard to stay in touch but she lives in Vermont with her family and I live in Glenside with mine. It can be difficult. Well, the next day she sent me an e mail. I love when those coincidences happen; you think of someone and they call or e mail. Incidentally, this same friend once remarked to me that in college I never wasted my time. When I had 5 or 10 minutes to spare I would study or organize my notes. See, it's all coming together.

So when I got her e mail, I thought, I should call her and catch up. We missed each other a few times but finally last night we chatted for a bit while she waited for her daughter's class to end. It was such a great conversation that it left me in a wonderful mood for the rest of the evening.


At the end of our conversation she said, "I wonder why we don't do this more often? Call each other when we have 10 or so minutes to spare?"

And she's right. So I'm getting over my dislike of phones and I'm putting 'Call a Friend' at the top of my 'What to do with 5 Minutes' list.