ON LASTING IMPRESSIONS

Although I am admittedly pretty terrible at remembering faces, I like to think I am good at remembering people. That may sound like a contradiction - sometimes I think the subtitle of my life is "a study in contradiction" - but sometimes I feel like I remember other people in far greater detail than they remember me. This used to bother me a lot; now it bothers me less.

In fifth grade, a new kid joined our school. He was easy to remember (and I try to present this as factually as possible without sounding judgmental), as he had a birth defect that left him minus a few fingers and one leg. Before he arrived at school, midway through the year, the teachers told us to be nice to him, not to tease him, etc. And I thought he and I got along just fine - I discovered a glitch in the Nintendo game "Ninja Gaiden" which helped him beat the game, for goodness' sake. After that year, his family moved away, and I didn't expect to ever see him again. The Labor Day weekend following that year - granted, fifteen months later - I ran into him at Plymouth, Indiana's "Blueberry Festival." I greeted him enthusiastically and he looked at me and said "Do I know you?"

Ouch.

I was thinking about that as I perused Facebook the other day. How many of the people I took improv classes with eleven years ago would remember me, or not be weirded out that I remember them? I think THAT, as much as anything, makes me apprehensive about contacting them. Because I feel like those classes meant so much to me and don't know what they meant to anyone else; people in that class went on to work at Second City, to do improv in the Netherlands, to write plays...and there was me, a suburban kid who didn't know what "downstage" meant. Not that we didn't all work together to create some very funny stuff - that's the beauty of improv - but still, I can't help but feel like an outsider.

One woman - a very, very, very funny woman - was in that class. I was taking the classes over the summer between years at school. So I took Level One with her between my sophomore and junior years, then Level Two with a completely different class between my junior and senior years. During my senior year at Bradley, Second City's National Touring Company came to campus and performed, and this very very very funny woman was performing with them! I greeted her enthusiastically and she paused, looked at me, and I knew it was coming - so I blurted out that we were in the same Level One class. I still don't think she remembered me, but she was very gracious in our conversation about fellow Level One class members. It's weird, because I'm fairly certain she's reasonably successful in the world of comedy, and I am very proud of knowing her (and anyone else I know who seems to be happy or doing well, for that matter).

I guess I sometimes feel like other people mean a lot more to ME than I mean to THEM. This isn't Typical Brad Self-Pity...just an observation. I'm sure there are people in my life that feel that I mean more to them than they mean to me. In any event, we'll see how the ol' Facebook Friend Request works out...I'm thinking complete Internet crashes around the world, but that's probably a worst-case scenario, right?