All My Famous Friends

My high school chum Gwenn always knew she’d be a writer. No, no, not a writer—an authoress. Yes, that’s it. In our senior yearbook she wrote that her plans for the future were to live out her days in a house on the beach and be an authoress. No more, no less. And because she was (especially in her own mind) in possession of a rare brilliance with the pen that none of her peers could ever hope to comprehend, she needn’t bore her peon classmates with the details on how she would go about realizing her sparkling destiny. Oh, and along the way it dawned on her by virtue of our junior class play that she was also deeply gifted in the dramatic arts, and so I suppose somehow one pursuit would eventually lead to another. I never bothered to tell her that I, too, was destined for dramatic greatness. I’ve been practicing my Oscar speech ever since my star turn as the Rooster in my elementary school’s production of The Bremen Town Musicians. I should be getting a call from the studios any day now.

What got me thinking about ‘ole Gwenn again after all this time was the sudden appearance on my TV of another high school acquaintance, as a cast member on one of this season’s reality TV shows. I hadn’t thought about Denise in about twenty years, but all of a sudden there she was in high-def, sporting the same illuminated grin she wore in the eighth grade, and being watched and talked about by millions of viewers all over the country. Unlike Gwenn, Denise had no highfalutin certainty of her eventual fame—she was just a genuine, bubbly, and downright humble gal who thought just as much of everyone else as she did of herself. And all of a sudden, here she is, famous—at least for the next fifteen minutes—and the irony of this fact is not lost on me. At an age when I and most probably many of my peers are examining our life progress to date and wondering if we are still at all on track to achieve the success and notoriety we expected by this point, Denise’s face on my TV serves as a wake-up call. I am personally not on quite the same path as I was at sixteen, and in all honesty would probably say that I haven’t yet achieved all that I’d have liked by now. But what of the folks I met along the line who struck me as stars in the making, or (like Gwenn) knew beyond a doubt that they were headed for greatness?

I had to know, so I started googling. First off was Ellie, a college dormmate of mine who shared Gwenn’s theatrical calling. She was part of the ego-laden drama group in-crowd that always intimidated me with their perfection and passion and visceral need to perform. Had Broadway found her yet? Google presented me with no drama-related hits, but it seems she has written a few articles on porch design for a small magazine in Southern California.

Next up—Eldred Laurence Bouvier, who to my awestruck young imagination WAS the next Courtney B. Vance. This young man was so perfect and self-realized that he found it his calling to bring the light of selfhood to the masses. I once saw him enlightening an insecure fellow freshman of mine, lecturing her in his perfectly enunciated tones that she needed to carry herself proudly and let shine her inner self. I had fully expected to see him on the big or small screen by now, but when I never did, I determined that the stage must have beckoned more loudly to him. As it turns out, my googling showed me that Larry does now do some local theater work, but as a side interest while he spends his days as an IT support specialist.

Further research showed me that none of my classmates in high school or college who were earmarked for fame had actually achieved it. They had sunk to the level of “normal people,” riding in crowded subway cars and anonymously sprinkling their lawns with the rest of the everymen and everywomen of the world. But just when I had begun to reassure myself that all of us, even the shining stars of our youth, become normal, average people at the end of the day, my college alumni newsletter threw me for a loop once again. Valerie Voljinski—who has had the good fortune of marrying into a much more user-friendly surname—is published. She is a novelist. She never claimed to be a literary icon in the making, or any kind of literary figure, for that matter. She was a psychology and English major, a seminar classmate and the quintessential, down-to-earth gal. She loved her lab rat and her boyfriend, she fulfilled her goal to become a social worker, and now she’s beat me to the book list. Consider me humbled.

Valerie and Denise are causing me to rethink my original theories about fame. Maybe renown isn’t reserved for the ones who shine most brightly early on. Maybe instead it is those whose light burns in a constant but unassuming glow who have the ability to maintain it and make it work for them when the others have burned themselves out. It’s not what we know about people’s abilities, but what we don’t know that has the power to impress us. Maybe those who aim so high so early find out eventually that what they’re striving for isn’t as perfect as they first imagined, while those who start off with their feet firmly in the soil of reality can see clearly where they want to go and how to get there.

I think I need to share this with Gwenn—she may appreciate it. And she may be able to share these lessons, if they’re worth anything, with her English students back at our old high school. Or she could fold it into a theatrical work—she is the junior and senior class play director, after all.