If You Live Long Enough, Everything’s Amazing!

I did spend most of the day, yesterday, trying to put all my notes together for Sandra’s new “official” bio — we’re talking 12 pages of notes, over 50 movie credits, 5 TV series, about 25 theater credits, and an untold amount of appearances on episodic TV shows, and then her career as a cabaret singer in Washington DC before any of that other stuff started…

At one point, I had to call her to get background stuff sorted out — from the years before I had even met her. And she was a little fuzzy on the dates & details. She said, “I remember the White House Jazz on the Lawn series was during the Carter Administration…”

Uh-oh. That’s going pretty far back.

So I said, “If it’s okay with you, I think I’ll call Wayne and see what he remembers.”

Wayne, my ex-husband in NYC, has been close friends with Sandra for a really long time. I knew they became friends in DC, where Wayne began his professional acting career (in theater), and they wound up as roommates for a while in NYC in the early 80s. But I never knew any of the details about how they met or when.

Wow. So.

It turns out that Wayne has an incredible memory.

He recalled exactly when and where they met (March 1977, at a cabaret show). And each time they met after that (summer of ’78, and again in the summer of ’79), until they became actual friends — for life.

I won’t post all the details he shared with me, because it’s personal stuff about their private lives. But it just amazed me that Wayne remembered all that stuff. So many amazing details about Sandra. And that’s going back over 45 years.

(I will add this fact– in 1980, Wayne gave Sandra the final $100 she needed for the plane fare out to Colorado to get her re-assignment surgery. )

The details Wayne shared with me covered that gap in my knowledge of Sandra. I know so much about her amazing life before she became successful, because all of that is in the play we’ve been working on together for 8 years.

So it was really cool for me to finally see just how she made that transition from who she’d been on the streets, to who she was when I met her. (When Wayne introduced me to Sandra, in 1992, he and I were living together, engaged to be married, and she lived in Toronto by then. She was in NYC, auditioning for the Broadway show, The Buddy Holly Story.) (She got the part.)

It just humanized everything for me — having Wayne’s side of the story.

I moved to NYC in 1980. Sandra moved there in 1982, and Wayne moved there in 1984. I realized yesterday, that we all share that cultural memory of what NYC was like in that era. And suddenly, my own perspective of life back then became part of the play about Sandra’s life.

Until that moment, I was always the “outside observer” to all the facts . It’s hard to explain. But Wayne’s memories changed all of that for me yesterday.

Anyway. It’s always great to chat on Sunday with Wayne!

He always makes a “Sunday dinner” for himself and his roommate, and he sends a photo out to a group on Instagram (always including the filthy ashtray and the lit cigarette, which is my favorite part!!!).

I was “officially” added to the group yesterday evening —