My major regret of our journey was a double slam. Midway through her medical conference, Ashley sent me a link for Cyrano's Playhouse in Anchorage. At first I didn't know why until I looked at their coming attractions page and saw my friend Suehyla El Attar's play The Perfect Prayer was being produced there. What was more, Suehyla would be attending several shows and giving talkbacks afterward from May 24 through May 28.
I've known Sue since high school and have acted with her many times. The Perfect Prayer was a play she had written an early version of in college and had produced at Mississippi State. I wasn't in the production, but she and I were both in the production of Triumph of the West that was paired with it. I thought it would be the greatest thing ever to show up for those talkbacks unannounced and ask her some dumb question just to see her lose her shit when she figured out it was me. Unfortunately, we quickly discovered that we were not going to be in Anchorage at any point during the time she was there. We were already going to be in the Fairbanks area and couldn't exactly jaunt back for a night in the RV. I phoned her up to see if she would be coming in any earlier, so we could maybe extend our time in the south before heading up, but it was not to be. She said she would have loved to have lost her shit at seeing a long lost costar such as myself planted in the audience. "I thought you people were all dead!" she would have said.
My other regret is that we didn't get to see her play at all. By the time we did return to Anchorage, on May 31, we had something of a crisis involving luggage and rapidly thawing fish, which took until well past 9 at night to resolve. I had to make do with seeing the theatre it was produced at and reading a glowing review of it posted in their window.
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