Sort of Been Kissed

Memoir Series - In the Spirit of Venus Retrograde and The Venus Cazimi - A Story of Past Loves and Heartbreaks

Cary Grant & Priscilla Lane taken for the film Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Content Warning: Domestic abuse, alcoholism, and violence

I was sixteen years old the first time I was kissed. Actually, that’s not completely true. The first time I was kissed was just a month or so before my sixteenth birthday, but it was a stage kiss. So it didn’t really count. I was kissed many times during rehearsals and then performances, long, lingering, passionate kisses. My sister watched the play on a Saturday night squished between our father and the father of the boy who was kissing me.

Afterward, my dad said to me, “It was pretty good except for all of that open-mouth kissing.”

I’d been cast as Elaine Harper, the ingénue role in “Arsenic and Old Lace”, the love interest of the lead. The character description by Joseph Kesselring reads, An attractive girl in her twenties and Mortimer’s fiancee, Elaine is the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Harper. She is surprisingly wise in the ways of the world for a minister’s daughter.

Me??? Yeah, Me.

When I called my mom to tell her on the January morning the cast list was posted she said, “Oh that’s great. Now you don’t have to worry about being typecast. Do you know what that is? Typecasting?”

A couple of months earlier I had been cast in my first high school play, a student-directed one-act called “The Dear Departed”. I played Amelia Slater. Here is the description from the script by Stanley Houghton - “a vigorous, plump, red-faced, vulgar woman, prepared to do any amount of straight talking to get her own way.” I was not phased at all by this and thought it quite hilarious. Plus, I had a lot of lines in that one. I was much more interested in stage time and a part I could sink my teeth into than in playing the one who gets kissed.

I would find just a few years later the character description of Amelia Slater rivaled by the description of the character I played in Elmer Rice’s “Street Scene” which was the first full-length play in college I would be cast in the winter of my sophomore year after first being cast in a student-directed one act the previous spring. I played Shirley Kaplan a dark, unattractive, spinster. The winner of worst character descriptions, however, goes to a friend of mine “crying virgin” and he was, at the time, a crying virgin.

“Yeah, I know what that means,” I said to my mother’s question about typecasting as she once again managed to hack away at my joy.

I was super excited when we were told by our high school theater teacher/director that the winter play would be “Arsenic and Old Lace”. I had just seen the movie at my friend Barbie’s house during a Christmas break sleepover and loved it. I immediately developed a crush on Cary Grant while watching it, and could not believe I was about to audition for this play. It felt like fate to me at the time, that I had Arsenic and Grant on the brain and suddenly this was going to be the first full-length play I would be auditioning for. I just knew it was going to happen. I was going to be in it.

The part of Elaine was smaller than the other two female roles in the play, Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha. During callbacks, I read for all three again and again as did the six other girls there. Six of the seven of us were cast. The director used the double-casting technique to allow for more of us to perform. This meant that each group of girls would get two out of the four performances. The seventh was asked to assistant direct. The play has many more male characters than females, so all of the boys got to act in all of the shows.

I was conflicted, I wanted the bigger, juicier part, and I wanted to be pretty. I was cast as pretty. Me. I had no idea how to be pretty and kept thinking there must be some kind of mistake.

Cary Grant Herb, who was cast as Mortimer Brewster, the leading male, romantic and otherwise, my kissing partner in the show, playfully grabbed a lock of my hair during callbacks and said, “You’re so cute!” This is how theater people can often be. Available. Honest. Intimate in the best of ways. He had a girlfriend (who used to sit in on rehearsals and watch me make out with her boyfriend while giving me dirty looks until she got banned by the director), so I had no illusions that he was being anything but sweet and friendly, but this was still a very unfamiliar landscape for me.

The first couple of kisses we shared during rehearsal were fairly chaste. About a week in Herb said to me backstage, “I am going to start kissing you very passionately during rehearsal tonight. Is this okay with you?”

“Uh, sure”, I said, like it was no big deal. Like I’d been kissing all of the boys all of the time and fake French kissing on stage would be easy breezy. It wasn’t. I mean, it was. It went fine. It looked fine. There was no tongue (even though from the audience’s perspective they could not tell this.) But I was dizzy and weak in the knees from all of this kissing with this very handsome and sweet teenage boy, one year older than me. I knew it was acting and not anything else, but oh, the kissing. I wanted more of it.

The aunts cast in my group were Jane and Liz, two senior girls. Jane was the one who had taken a chance on me and cast me in the one-act play she had directed just a month or so prior. We’d had so much fun working on that play, a farce, an ensemble piece, with some of the funniest people cast alongside me, so funny that we could not make it through a single rehearsal without at least one of us breaking character. The memory of Jane, throwing her script in the air and then dissolving into laughter herself, while we were rehearsing in her basement the night before dress rehearsal is forever etched upon my brain. She and I were well on our way to being good friends. I had watched her and Liz that autumn in our school’s production of “The Shadow Box” and thought they were both amazing, hoped that someday I would be on that stage either with them (a serious long shot as I had been afraid at the point to audition for anything) or with others like them.

They both embraced me immediately as their friend, age differences melting away as so much does when collaborating on a creative project. They took care of me and protected me. It was the first time I had friends who were older than I was. In some ways, I was well beyond my physical years myself, and in others, I was stunted, behind what many of my contemporaries were doing. I was in love with all of them, every single person in the show. They were mostly seniors and juniors, and I was the only sophomore. It was a huge deal to high school me.

I found a family in the theater community I did not know I had been missing for years. The first time I went to a drama club meeting, earlier that fall, I was greeted and hugged by Lars. I had known him in junior high. He was just one year ahead of me. He lit up that afternoon when he saw me headed to the theater and before I knew it delivered his hug. It was spontaneous and sincere and I could not remember the last time a boy had hugged me.

Lars was in “Arsenic”, as we would call it, as were most of my favorite people from the drama club. Playing the ingénue does not require the level of work or intellectual focus that many characters do, even though I did have a couple of juicy scenes, besides the heavy kissing moments, including one where I was kidnapped and squirreled away into the basement by Jonathan Brewster (played by Jerry) and his sidekick, Dr. Einstein (played by Lars). As soon as we would get behind the “basement” door (which was just a door to nowhere), Lars and Jerry would start screwing around with me while I was trying to stay in character. I also got to be funny. Elaine Harper is a bit more complex than your traditional ingénue.

The typical requirements for the ingénue role are beauty, presence, and likability. Yeah. Me. So I had a lot of time on my hands to laugh and play and goof off and get to know these gorgeous beings. Most of them had a lot more work to do on the show, and I loved slinking down in a chair in the theater watching them be their funniest and best selves.

The director, Bruce Drouin, who also taught English, all the drama classes, and directed all of the plays, largely left me alone. He was a cocaine-using, mentally and emotionally ill alcoholic who psychologically tortured pretty much every theater student he encountered at one point or another. I was still new and shiny. He was working on gaining my trust, as he would, before flipping into his abusive personality with me as he eventually did the next fall right at the same moment my stepfather was finally banished from our home.

So, for the first time in years, I was happy. For a few brief months, from October of 1982 through February of 1983, the abuse at home faded a bit into the background, in part because I was hardly ever home. Play rehearsals, drama club, color guard, band, and debate club kept me at school most days from 7:30 am-9:00 pm and I rarely saw my stepfather. Jane, who had a challenging home environment as well, was the first person who seemed to truly understand what I was going through, and I suddenly was no longer alone.

I drank coffee with them. We hung out at diners more times than I can count. They took me to the midnight showing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, dressed up, brought all of the props, and taught me all of the audience participation bits, “Bater!”. They cracked sexual jokes I did not fully understand and yet laughed at anyway. Either Jane or Liz almost always picked me up and drove me home when we had nighttime rehearsals. They treated me like one of them.

The play opened with a Wednesday Matinee for students. Any English class during that period of time was invited to attend. The other set of three girls, Cheryl, Gwen, and Stephanie (she was Elaine in this group and a senior), acted during that performance. It was decided at some point, due to my age, that I should not be doing all of that kissing on stage in front of other students my own age, so Liz and Jane and I got the Thursday and Saturday night shows, and the other three got the Wednesday matinee and Friday night performances.

I was a combination of nerves and excitement all day that Thursday. I am not sure how I made it through classes knowing what was ahead. This was it. It was my debut in my first-ever full-length play. I was doing it! I was doing the thing I had said I wanted to do since the age of 5 when I first saw “The Sound of Music”. From that moment on, any time this question was asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“An actor” or “An actor and a singer”, was always my response. Truthfully, what I wanted was to be Julie Andrews. I was completely starstruck by her presence and talent and her voice, but even at that young age, I knew I could not be her. She was already playing Julie Andrews herself, so I would have to find my own way

My opening night was every bit as exciting and fun and magical as I wanted it to be. I got laughs, I got a couple of whistles, I got gasps (kidnapped, remember), and I got applause. I was in it, totally, from my first entrance, chasing down my errant fiancee, to my last moment, throwing myself into his arms as he exclaimed, “Elaine! I’m a bastard!”

The curtain came down after the Thursday night performance and everyone hugged each other. I was hugged more times than I ever had been before. Bill Something-Or-Other even picked me up and swung me around as he hugged me. The excitement I felt after being on stage for my first full-length play was high. My friends brought me flowers and some of my teachers from Junior High attended. It was exactly like I had imagined it would be.

Saturday night was even better. I was more at ease and ran with it, both due to the comfort I was feeling on stage and the knowledge that this was it. It would be over after tonight, so why not go all out?

Both my parents were in the audience that night. My stepfather was not. Even after years of abuse, I had asked him to come and let him know that it would mean a lot to me if he did. I was still trying to gain his love or at the least get him to like me. He told me he’d think about it. He was a no-show. I pretended not to care. I mostly did not care, but I did, of course, care. I could not understand why he did not like me. I did not understand that I was trying to apply logic to someone who was psychotic.

When the curtain fell that Saturday night, my excitement was mixed with sadness. It was over. Oh, the hugs still happened, and there was still the cast party, which would be held at Lars’s house, but my time as Elaine Harper had come to an end. I could feel the long, lonely path begin to extend in front of me again, the path that I had filled with rehearsals and performing was now empty. Home loomed.

The following week was strange, hollow. I hung around Jane’s and Liz’s lockers before class and on breaks, trying to recapture the magic. They were all in the choir and got to be together there daily and were also a year or two ahead of me. I was in the band, and a sophomore, so I had no classes with any of them. Yeah, I played the French horn. Badly. Theater nerds and band geeks were different crowds. Up until “The Dear Departed” and drama club my friend group primarily was made up of those I had been in 7th and 8th grade with, most of whom were in the band. We were a tight group, and they supported my journey into the realm of magic and make-believe that theater offered, came to all of my shows, and put up with my highly dramatic sensibility, but they were separate groups, the band friends and the theater friends.

It was Friday of that week when I ran into Lars. He asked me if I wanted to stay after school and hang out. “Yes! please!”

We had become close during “Arsenic”, and I jumped at the chance. I also kind of thought maybe we liked one another. He sort of had a girlfriend at the time, but he told me that they were not really together anymore that afternoon right before he kissed me.

We kissed all over the school that afternoon, in the empty hallway by his locker, in the hall behind the theater, in the theater, backstage, outside behind the school where the burnouts went to smoke, everywhere. We spent hours holding hands and kissing. It was official. I had been kissed, for real, not on stage, but by a boy who actually liked me.

We grabbed the late buses home, each of us getting on a different one as we lived in different neighborhoods with promises of phone calls that weekend. I floated into my house, giddy from all that kissing, and walked into the horror show already in progress. My mother, still drunk, was lying on the couch in the living room, an ice pack on her split and bloodied lip. My stepfather was locked in his room (when he’d moved in he’d walled up the family room, put a door on it, and taken it for himself.) My sister was in her bedroom.

The day before, our stepfather had stayed out after work drinking. Our mother decided to pay him back in kind. She came home absolutely blitzed right around the time the phone rang. It was my Aunt Laverne, my father’s sister, calling from her home in Ohio. My father had been in a serious car accident while on a business trip in Pennsylvania, was in critical condition, and was headed into surgery. We were in Illinois. My very drunk mother was trying to make sense of the information she was receiving and talk to my aunt, while my stepfather was trying to wrestle the phone away from her to take the call as he was not drunk at the time. He punched her in the face and she let him have the phone.

He heard me come home, came out of his room, and said flatly, “Your father’s been in a serious car accident. Your aunt is flying out there to be with him. He’s in critical condition. They don’t know if he’ll make it.” He then turned and went back into his cave leaving me standing there trying to process what he had just told me along with the scene continuing to play out in front of me.

I tried talking to my mother, on the couch, with the bloody lip, but she was still slurring her words. My sister came out of her room and told me what had happened between our mother and stepfather.

In a trance, I headed down to the basement, picked up the phone, and called Lars.
The basement was the only room in the house where I was allowed to make phone calls due to “my voice being too loud”, just one of my stepfather’s many, many control mechanisms.

”Hello,” it was his voice on the phone, thankfully, and not his mother’s. She was always lovely to me, but he was the only one I wanted to talk to, and I did not want to have to ask for him.

Long pause on my end as I tried to speak without breaking down.

”Hello?” he said. “Is anyone there?” This was 1983, there was no such thing as caller id.

“Hey,” I said, barely getting the word out.

Laughing he replied with, “What are you doing? We just saw each other a half hour ago!”

I sat at my mother’s old sewing table and proceeded to tell Lars what I had come home to, my voice a monotone. I heard a thumping sound at one point and asked him what he was doing. “I am hitting myself for teasing you for calling me so soon after we’d just seen each other.”

“What do you need?” he asked me.

“I need to get out of here.”

I don’t remember who picked me up, but if I had to guess, it was Jane. Lars did not yet have his license, so it could not have been him. I don’t at all remember the rest of that night. I have no recollection of where we went, what we did, or even who was present. I do remember my sister asking me not to leave and saying to her, “I can not be here right now.” I wish I’d taken her out of there with me. She retreated back into her room, picking up her violin and disappearing into her music.

I returned home around midnight. The house was quiet. I really have no memory of anything else from that night including who I talked to when I returned, if anyone. I think my stepfather was sleeping in his room downstairs and my mother was upstairs in their bedroom, but this is just a guess and it is somewhat concerning to me that I have no memory of anything from the moment I left the house until the next morning.

I woke dreading what the day would bring. We spoke to our dad and aunt by phone. She had traveled from Ohio to Pennsylvania to be with him. He had some broken bones and a collapsed lung, but his surgery had been successful, and he was expected to recover.

I don’t recall seeing our stepfather. Maybe he was out. Maybe he was locked in his room which was filled, believe it or not, with mystical items including crystals and incense and chimes and a lava lamp, and all sorts of other metaphysical paraphernalia. He claimed he was way into meditation and astral travel and other spiritual pursuits. He was also convinced he was the second coming of Jesus Christ. As I said, psychotic.

Around noon our mother invited us to go for a ride with her, my sister and me. About forty-five minutes later or so we found ourselves at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. It was pretty far from where we lived, and I am assuming now that she made this choice to make it harder for him to track us down.

“I’m going to divorce him,” she said over chips and guacamole.

I remember feeling a combination of relief and suspicion. I had long stopped trusting my mother, yet, as far as I knew, this was the first time he’d visibly directed his violence at anyone other than me. I thought maybe, maybe now he’d be gone. Now that he’d hit her, she would have had enough.

“Yeah, sure you are,” my sister said. She was not convinced.

She was correct. More than six months would pass before he finally left. I would leave six days before he did, and this is a story for another time.

If you’re not familiar with the plot of “Arsenic and Old Lace”, it is a violent one and filled with mentally ill characters. Teddy Brewster believes himself to be Theodore Roosevelt. Jonathan Brewster is a murderous psychopath, and Aunts Abby and Martha are “sweet little old ladies” who murder lonely old men out of the “kindness of their hearts”. It also happens to be a comedy. I understand now why it was so appealing to me at the time. Life and death and love and laughter with an actual psychopath to boot all mixed together. When Jonathan abducts Elaine, her terror at that moment was easy for me to play. As much as I loved my scenes with Herb, this was always my favorite moment. I got to yell and scream and try to fight the bad guy. I did not have to go far to source the feelings needed for the scene.

And Lars, what happened there?

Our relationship was short-lived. It turns out that his “not really girlfriend” was actually still his girlfriend. Bad things were written about me on the wall of the girls’ bathroom about how I steal other girl’s boyfriends. My longest friend, my next-door neighbor, my bestie from the age of 6 months old, Gina, was the one who told me about it.

“What are you doing, hanging out with some other girl’s boyfriend?” she scolded me.

My shocked face told her all she needed to know about it. I thought they were no longer boyfriend and girlfriend.

“I am going to go to the janitor and get some supplies to clean it off,” I said.

“Don’t bother, I scratched it off,” she replied.

I waited for Lars outside of his class a few minutes later, as I normally did. He lit up when he saw me, flashing me his sweet and toothy smile. His expression quickly changed as I yelled at him about the bathroom wall and the lies. He apologized and told me that they had been broken up when he first kissed me, but that they had gotten back together at some point, and that he was confused.

He wasn’t really confused about her or me. It was something else he was confused about. He was stalling and in denial, doing everything he could to avoid what he already knew. He would slowly start to come out as gay during the next school year. Even though he and I were only romantically involved for a few weeks there in the late winter of my sophomore year, I held a torch for him all throughout my junior year, he was a senior at the time, even after he started to come out. I did not handle this well. He was my first kiss, he was there during some of the most brutal times of my life, and I had formed an attachment to him.

I thought maybe he was confused about being gay too. Being gay. He was not. He was clear. He was gay.

And on a cold winter night in 1984, he and I sat on the hood of his car which was parked in my driveway, and I cried on his shoulder as I let my torch for him go out.

Feeling all of the love and very vulnerable today due to the Venus Cazimi and everything this story brought back to me, this gorgeous rose quartz found its way to me at the Farmers’ Market