johnnyhongkong says…

Early in our sojourn in New York, Mary Milan and I caught up with Mr. T(JE), an old college buddy who was a member of the storied Team JHK acting company (which, by the way, [pat on my back warning] has “produced” a real life working actor who was Punk’d last year and since then seems to be everywhere).

Anyway, back to Mr. T(JE): In the few years since college, he got married to his lovely college sweetheart, bought a home, and had a beautiful daughter. They had us over for dinner at their apartment which overlooks the Hudson River in Riverdale. We dined on mac and cheese, crab cakes, shrimp cocktail, chicken, and salad. We drank wine. We ate fine chocolate. We reminisced.

The story came up about how I once dared him to drink a mixture of water, cigarette ash and butts for twenty 40’s of Colt 45, which he did and I promptly filled the bathtub in his dorm room with ice and 40’s. When his wife asked why he did it he said, “I had a bathtub full of 40’s!”

And story about the time we spat hot fire when spitting hot fire actually meant spitting hot fire.

I wanted to cover his daughter’s ears because a guy like that can’t be anyone’s dad. And what startled me was that after all these years, he was still the same as that guy in college except the setting had changed.

Gone was the dorm room and replaced with a real apartment that they own; his girlfriend had become his wife, a mother, and “HBIC” (Head Bitch in Charge); instead of acting and studying Italian, he’s investing insurance premiums and getting an MBA; and then there’s the kid - a smart and beautiful little 2-year old girl whose vocabulary is better than most 5-year olds.

That’s just waaaay too much for a mid-late 20’s couple to handle, especially when the dad has a penchant for scaling downspout drain systems while drunk, just for kicks.

But when I held their daughter, my anxieties for them melted away. The reality was that they had done such a good job planning their lives after college because they knew they wanted to start a family and I was holding the fruit of their work and sacrifice.

He and his wife did good. I must have sounded like an idiot because I couldn’t stop telling them how well they had done.

I was reminded of the last time I saw him a few ago. I asked him if he had any regrets that he didn’t continue acting, and he said, “No, I have a family. That’s all I want.”

I guess that’s what a grownups do. They make choices about how they want their lives to be and then they do whatever it takes to make it happen.

And here I thought that taking “picayune and persnickety” out of Joey Jerusalem and Jessie Napoli’s wedding ceremony meant that I was all growed up. It all feels so close and unreal to me. My guess is that we will be revisiting this subject at various times in the future as I will try, undoubtedly fail and hopefully succeed in slipping into the skin of a grownup.