Williamstown, Summer 2003
Famous was a matter of time. We inhaled stardust and pollen in the sweltering heat of Massachusetts June, summer theatre. A cicada finale played as the curtain of dusk descended over green hillocks nightly, an audience of mountains darkening in the distance, fireflies our dimming footlights. We made a black box out of the brutalist cafeteria in the mosquito bite of a college town, where legends arrived like meteor showers: performed their hour on the main stage and vanished—Betty Buckley, Sherie Rene Scott, Lili Taylor—a dazzling of aspiration. Worked the lemonade-stand-cum-snack-bar on our nights off and I got the change wrong every time, flushed first with embarrassment that burst into abandon. Famous doesn’t carry cash and we had famous on layaway. We had famous half-in-the bag and it didn’t matter what it cost or what change was made in the exchange. We had famous on credit: Chris’s dad was on the TV show Chips, Katherine’s dad was on Law & Order, my dad was dead, six years, famously dead—rapt audience every time I told it. Cambie breezed into the rehearsal room at 10am every morning smacking on a hot Subway chicken sandwich because famous don’t give a fuck what breakfast should be. And me, I fucked like the famous: never met a man I couldn’t forget, even the boyfriend waiting back home. I met Anthony Rapp one night after the show and I said, What’s your name? and he said, Anthony Rapp, and I said, Oh, like I didn’t know, like the musical Rent hadn’t saved my life. But that wasn’t any life I was going back to. Burn it all down on the way out. Didn’t know the economy was already in flames. We were on fire, burned so hot sparks flew from Manhattan to Massachusetts. Lights out on Broadway. Famous doesn’t function in the dark. We had fireflies, but we were still in the dark. Met Karen Ziemba one night after the show and I said, I’m Michael, and she said, Oh, and walked on like she didn’t know.
Michael Todd Cohen’s work appears in Columbia Journal, Pithead Chapel, JMWW Journal, and HAD, among others, has been included in Best Micro Fictions and the Connecticut Literary Anthology, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives with a poet-husband and two illiterate chihuahuas, by a rusty lighthouse, in New England. For more: michaeltoddcohen.com.