"For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago...."
Angela + Angela, 1995.
Angela was my best friend from boarding school. I met her on the first day of freshman year at Marian Heights Academy, in August 1988. Eighteen days ago, on Wednesday, November 12th, I lost her to a car accident.
Although it's lifted somewhat, I'm still in a great deal of shock. Still doing that thing where I wake up in the morning and then it hits me all over again. "Oh that's right, Angela's gone." For the first few days after getting that phone call, I was 100% on autopilot, going around in a zombified grief-trance. I was so out of it that my family wouldn't let me drive. I notified a few classmates of Angela's passing, but selfishly gave up after the fourth call because it made me sick to say the words, and typing them out felt even worse.
Since attending Angela's visitation (John and I drove down to Missouri to pay our respects last weekend), the dam has broken and I've officially entered the blubbering, sobbing mess phase. The Sally Field "I want to know WHYYYYYY!" phase.
Appropriately, Angela and I were in Steel Magnolias together our senior year of high school, and Angela played M'Lynn, the Sally Field character who gets to make that speech. (I was Miss Clairee -- I got to say, "Go ahead M'Lynn, slap her!")
Clairee and M'Lynn, backstage on the set of Steel Magnolias, 1992.
Angela and I played sisters a year earlier in another school production, Crimes of the Heart, and we had a blast. There was a scene where she and I were sitting at the kitchen table together, listening to another character talk. As this character wraps up her monologue, Angela and I were supposed to look at one another and sort of snicker for a minute, then burst into inappropriate laughter. We wanted to get the scene right and make the laughter genuine, so in rehearsals we would murmur nonsensical phrases under our breath to try to crack each other up. We talked to each other without moving our lips, like ventriloquists, saying things like "Poop Soup," and "Buffalo Farts" until we dissolved into punch drunk hysterics. And you know what? We nailed it every performance. (Such method actors we were!)
I've gone through boxes of old pictures, looking for more gems from our four years at Marian Heights, but I'm finding that the best photos of Angela and I are the ones from our post-high school era. When we graduated MHA and left Ferdinand, I went back to Indianapolis to attend court reporting school, while Angela--a native of the Missouri "Bootheel" region--started her undergrad career at St. Louis University. Once Angela and I realized how quick and easy it was to just slide up and down Interstate 70 (only three and a half hours, depending on who's driving), we visited each other several times a year throughout the nineties. Sometimes Angela's sister Bonita would come with her on her sojourns to Indy, and I have a memory of the three of us singing Janet Jackson's "Nasty" for karaoke at the bar my boyfriend managed. Our song selection stands out because it was the most awkward song to sing for karaoke, full of long pauses and various grunts and "ooh"s and "uhhh"s. We were laughing so hard at how weird we sounded, we could barely finish it.
Another time Angela came to Indy for a visit, she and I decided to catch a movie---When A Man Loves A Woman---the Meg Ryan drama where she plays an alcoholic mother bottoming out. Sitting in our seats before the show, we idly wondered how much of a tearjerker the movie would be. One of us brought up the Leslie Nielsen/Priscilla Presley scene in Naked Gun where they wander out of a movie theater, laughing their asses off, and the camera pans up to reveal that they've just seen Platoon. We both joked about recreating that scene if the movie turned out to be a major downer. I think we were actually expecting WAMLAW to be weepy but fairly light, maybe something along the lines of Beaches, or Lifetime Channel for Women-type fare. We were both unprepared by how dark WAMLAW is; in one memorable scene, Meg Ryan gets blackout drunk, slaps her children around, downs a fistful of pills, and crashes through a glass shower door. It's all very brutal.
When the end credits started rolling and the lights went up, Angela and I both looked at each other, like, "Wow, that was....a lot."
Then she started snickering. I was like, "What?" And then she looked at me, and laughed some more, and finally I got it. I broke into a Beavis and Butthead-esque "Oh yeah. Uh, huh huh huh huh huh huh," in recognition. Shenanigans continued as we headed up the aisle of the theater, walking and laughing, catching each other's eye, and laughing some more.
By the time we reached the lobby, we were doubled over and hyperventilating, cackling wildly at absolutely nothing. We stumbled past the cheerful ticket taker, who, noticing our mirth, called out, "Glad you ladies enjoyed the show!" And that, of course, made us laugh even harder.
Angela had this great, absurdist sense of humor. I'm pretty sure she was the only friend of mine who actually read Woody Allen's Without Feathers on my recommendation. I remember her getting a bang out of the chapter with the "lost" Biblical writings.
In turn, Angela introduced me to the Enneagram. One of her professors was really into it, and so Angela got into it, too, and gave me an armload of books on the Enneagram during one of my visits to St. Louis. (I'm a 4w3, in Ennagram parlance; Angela, a 2w3. Interesting stuff, and IMO more accurate than Myers-Briggs.)
With Angela as a tour guide, visiting St. Louis was awesome. She lived in the Central West End, a hip neighborhood with fun, quirky shops (Heffalump's!), indie coffee houses, and Forest Park (a larger, less famous version of Central Park). Angela lived with a roommate in this giant loft apartment with exposed brick that was straight off the set of Friends. It was cool as hell.
One of my favorite trips, though, was the summer I visited Angela down in her hometown of Bernie, MO, in the aforementioned Bootheel of the state. It's an interesting region--on the north end of the Mississippi Delta--lots of rich history, southern-inspired cuisine (I had fried okra for the first time in Bernie!), and Delta blues music.
Anyhoo, I loved it:
I can't even put into words how much I love this photo of Angela.
Never discard "imperfect" shots.
Someday, you'll be glad you saved them.
Me, all countrified.
 Angela feeding the sheep. |
In the kitchen of Angela's childhood home.
If I could, I would so time travel back to this moment in 1993 and just hang out there indefinitely.
Around 1997-ish, Angela was accepted to a graduate program at Tulsa University (I honestly can't remember if it was a PhD or Master's program. She didn't make a big deal out of that kind of stuff. She didn't need to. Girl was smart.) I was overjoyed, because Tulsa is where half of my family lives. That meant that even though Angela would no longer be as close as she was in St. Louis, I'd still get to see her anytime I was in Tulsa. The timing was perfect---my sister Michelle and my Aunt Donna had just moved into a large rental house in an up-and-coming neighborhood on the southside of the city, and they had a loft for a third roomie, so Angela joined them.
Seriously, looking back on it all, I can't believe how lucky I was. How lucky we both were to have all the time together that we did. It's one of the things I hold onto now.
Hanging out with Angela in Tulsa during the summer of 1999, she had some news. She'd met a guy through her church that she really dug, and it seemed serious. Like, this dude might be The One. Angela introduced me to Brian, and I got a good vibe from him. He seemed really smitten with my friend and he treated her well, which was my biggest concern. I soon found out that he was a movie buff with an offbeat sense of humor. Another good sign. During my visit, he hosted a dinner party at his apartment, and we all watched Radioland Murders. I was like, "Okay, this guy's a keeper. Well done. Approval: granted."
Angela and Brian got married in 2000. They started a family a few years later, settling down in the Missouri Bootheel to work and live. I always thought it was cool that they did that. Angela worked in mental health, and in her hometown, she saw a community that was underserved, and felt compelled to change that. Her kids got to grow up close to grandparents and cousins, in the same place she'd grown up. There was a nice symmetry to it all.
Angela and I kept in touch over the years, but we didn't see each other like we used to. You know how it goes, you grow up (a little), you get married, life gets busy and complicated, suddenly you're 40, then 50....sigh. Yeah. You know how it goes.
I'm sad she is gone, but I'm glad she was here. I'm glad she found a great partner in Brian. I'm glad she went into mental health, because there was never a person more compassionate, more empathetic, more suited to that field than Angela. I'm glad she got to be a mom, because she was really good at it.
I'm glad I got to be her friend.
(If you know, you know.)
