Recently, I started getting in touch with some old friends of mine from high school. I had completely lost touch with most people since graduation, 13 years ago, and have never attended a reunion event or anything.
So, I’ve been e-mailing a couple people, and decided to contact this girl. I dropped her a note and said I thougt it might be nice to hear from you, blah blah blah, what have you been up to, what kind of career are you involved with, etc.? You know, the standard getting-back-in-touch drill.
I hear back from her, and she’s really excited to have heard from me. We hung around in roughly the same circles in school, although she straddled the “smart kids” and “popular kids” cliques pretty safely. She says how great it is that I e-mailed her, tells me what happened to her after graduation and in college, all of that stuff.
Then, she tells me she’s been working as a professional stand-up comedian! For the last six years, she’s been touring around the country, working with everyone from Chris Rock to Rosie O’Donnell to just about anyone in comedy. She performs as Tammy Pescatelli (not her real name, but I won’t post that here). She does some freelance joke writing for various shows, including “Dennis Miller.” She recently tapes a pilot for CBS, although it isn’t getting picked up. She won the “Bud Light Ladies of Laughter” competition.
Wow! Someone I know is really successful! (And keep in mind, we went to a tiny school in NE Ohio, with a graduating class of 120.) I tell her I now live in Northern Virgina, and she tells me that, as it happens, she’s going to be at the DC Improv Oct. 3-8. She asks me and Leigh-Anne to be her guests at the show.
So, once she’s in town, we get in contact over the phone, and do a little catching up. We make plans for me and Leigh-Anne to meet her at her hotel Friday evening, get something to eat, then we’ll come to the 8:00 show. Leigh-Anne calls me at work to tell me she has to stay a little late, so I head into DC and she plans to meet us at the hotel separately.
I get to her hotel, call up, and she meets me downstairs. It was like no time had passed–same old Tammy! She was always very funny and creative in school, and really has capitalized on it. I get another call from Leigh-Anne that she’s going to be very late, so she tells us to go ahead and find a place to eat. We alked up towards Dupont CIrcle and got food at a Greek place. We sat, ate, and chatted about our lives, what we’d been doing, who we were in touch with, what people ended up doing, what a cultural vacuum Perry, Ohio is, and everything else we could think of. Leigh-Anne didn’t end up leaving work until nearly 6:00, so we met her at the Dupont Metro exit and walked to the Improv. Tammy greeted her like she was an old friend; it was very sweet.
Tammy got us our seats, and made sure the waiter comped our drinks for the evening. She was so excited because Gene Simmons from KISS had been to the show the previous night, and really liked her act, so he had sent her roses. Her act was terrific–it’s very, very interesting to know the person behind the act before you get to see it. After the show, she told us she had gotten a call after leaving the stage from an agency in LA. They had gotten her name from someone else, and wanted her to fly out to LA Monday to audition for a co-hosting spot on a game show on VH1. So, we hung out with her, waited for them to fax her the audition script, read through it with her, and helped her search for flight information. (She had to leave after her Sunday night show, be in LA for an audition Monday at noon, fly back to DC then home to Cleveland, and be in Omaha on Wednesday for a show in Sioux Falls that night).
All in all, it was a VERY cool reunion with someone I remembered as a good friend, we got to see a very funny show, and we promised to keep in touch. An excellent evening for everyone.
