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A Post from Joan of Arc

Another Friday night in Boca Raton and I’m fried. What a week – we ran the skydiving series “13,500 Reasons to Scream” after which I fielded what felt like hundreds of calls from friends and family intermittently questioning and downright accusing me about whether or not I’d lost my mind.

“Katie, I don’t have 13,500 reasons to scream but I certainly have one … watching a video of my daughter jump out of an airplane on Youtube. Call me!” My mother sounded a little hysterical on my voice mail. I promised myself I’d try to call her back from the car.

There’s a magnificent sunset – the kind printed on old postcards from the ‘80s stacked at the front desk of bad motels in Tampa. Cars are darting in and out without the luxury of blinkers and the realization that the Snow Birds are here for “The Season” begins to sink in. Ok. Now I get it. I turn down Camino Real to swing left on 4th Street to hang another left into the parking lot of Joan of Arc, a giant church with a tall steeple on the right.

I walk upstairs to the second floor to see my sometimes co-conspirator, oft confidante, and forever most-cherished friend, Laura Kennedy; she’s shouting orders like a lieutenant in the Special Forces. Young men of all shapes and sizes are organizing chairs and tables into perfect rows.

What’s amazing is not that this pretty, petite, professional beauty of part-Cuban descent is barking orders in the middle of a church at 7 o’clock on a Friday night; what’s amazing is a bunch of guys who look like they stepped out of the “extras” line for Goodfellas or who are now regulars on “Miami Ink” were following her instructions unquestioningly. She’s amazing. She sees me and flashes me a big smile, her eyes dancing with laughter. I’ve always thought Laura looks a little like Liza Minnelli in her ‘70s idol-Studio 54 heyday combined with one of the icons worshipped by every little girl who grew up figure skating in my era … Dorothy Hamill.



I loop back into the Ladies Room. As I wash my hands, the woman in the mirror – a fraught and frail version of me – stares back…looking exhausted, angry and a little confused. I take a deep breath and walk in and grab a seat next to Laura. We kiss cheek to cheek.

Everyone in the room settles down and it gets very, very quiet. Then he begins to speak. Jake. He’s a light-haired, blue-eyed skinny kid from Baltimore...mid twenties … his diction is Gansta … his exterior screams White Suburbia. He’s deep – in a kind of Eminem type way. I love Eminem, by the way. Exteriors can be deceiving – I soon learn.

But tonight he wasn’t talking about exteriors. Actually, he was. He was talking about how his obsession with the outside – his outsides, your outsides, my outsides almost killed him. I’m sitting there at 7 p.m. on a Friday night because the same game almost killed me too.

Suddenly he begins to talk about his “Ex.” He had recently seen her downtown and he spent a minute or two recalling their painful breakup which ended with her shouting at him … in the middle of the road … at dawn … “Jake, why won’t you let me love you.”

That got my attention. He carried on for a moment and just as he began to lose me in a morass of anecdotes he suddenly stopped. Then he looked up and – almost poetically – blurted out: “Why would I continue to make someone a priority who considers me an option?”

Suddenly everyone else in the room just faded away and it was just me and him. Jake at the podium, and me, quietly sitting in one of the millions of chairs that litter Florida’s public schools. I was transfixed. Then it was over and everyone was hugging and back slapping and kissing and smiling.

I hopped up on one of the tables against the wall in the back of the room to take in the scene and catch my breath.

Why possibly make someone a priority who considers you an option?

I had never asked myself that before.

posted by J.P. @ 9:05 PM