Dinner Break

I have a lot of stories from dinner breaks on shows.  Whether it's between a matinée and an evening show, during a tech, or during long one-day events, I feel like half my journal entries are about dinner breaks.  This is partly because dinner break is the main time I have to write when I'm working and partly because since everyone has to eat, it's the one big unifier on a show that brings together cast, crew, band, designers... (or, occasionally, drives them apart).  Some of my favorite conversations have happened on dinner breaks, and so have some of the most memorable "did that really happen?" moments.  This is about one of the latter.

There's a Tony-winning actress of the stage and screen whom I particularly admire.  She can make you laugh and cry in the same moment; through her specificity and intelligence she can find depth and humor in any text; and she has an underlying grace and elegance even when playing the most caustic of characters.  I've always felt that if you combined Audrey Hepburn, Eve Arden, and Greer Garson, you'd come up with this actress (yes, my taste in movies is somewhat outdated.  This is what happens when every Friday growing up you always rent a movie from the "Classics" section of Blockbusters... but I digress.).  I would pay to see her in pretty much anything, and at the time of this incident, she was a regular on a short-lived, very under-appreciated TV show that I watched.  Her character had started as one of quite a few smaller players, but week by week she was becoming more central because her performance turned the character from a cliché to a goldmine of emotions and layers.  Anyway, I worked a gala with a bunch of Broadway and television actors.  At dinner break I turned the corner and there she was.  (I'd had no idea she was even at the event.)  And what did she say to me?  "F&#K it's cold in here!  Right? Hey, where'd you get that pizza?"

...Graceful, elegant, brilliant Tony winners curse and eat pizza?  What?  Nuh-unh.  When they speak, rainbows come out of their mouths, and surely they only eat the most refined cuisine (which was being served to the stars in another room. The pizza was for us nobodies.).  She got some pizza and ate it right next to me, standing up, leaning on a railing....  I've worked on events with celebrities who had three-page-long contract riders that included specific brands of candy, exotic fruits, and nuts, none of which they even ate, so it's nice to know that there are also some cursing, pizza-eating stars with a Tony at home who think nothing of forgoing the VIP room to eat a slice leaning over a railing with the rest of us.