The Two O'Clock Miracle

Los Angeles, California

My phone conversations with my friend, Lynnette, are occasionally zany, inexplicable episodes similar to twelve year-olds free-associating, and maybe even more like Lucy and Ethel during their trip to Hollywood. I should perhaps write that you have to be there to understand this. Though I will try to recapture it here, after reading this you may still actually scratch your head in incomprehension. So maybe I should just go ahead and write that you have to be there to get this.

Recently, Lynnette and I were trying to backtrack on our calendars to find the date of a farewell crab dinner I hosted around the time Lynnette and her husband were moving away from this area. Oddly, neither of us could find it on our calendars. Particularly odd since we both keep our calendars pretty efficiently. She keeps hers online, and I keep mine on a paper Susan Branch pocket calendar, replaced each year (technically, we are both Scorpios but I am convinced that I was born under the sign of Paper). We knew the year of the party, and had it down to a couple of months, but neither of us could find the exact date of the event noted on our calendars. We digressed to a lot of reminiscing about other occasions which were on our respective calendars from a few years back. It was then that I noticed my calendar square on December 20, 2017 was marked: Miracle 2:00.

I started to tell Lynnette that I had a miracle scheduled on a Thursday in December, but the absurdity of a scheduled miracle caused me to start laughing. And the more I tried to tell her, the more I laughed. I finally got it out, and then she started laughing. Every time we stopped laughing, and I tried to work out how it was that I had a miracle scheduled, and not just a scheduled miracle, but a 2:00 scheduled miracle, we both started laughing again. We continued this in the style of The Mary Tyler Moore Show Death of Mr. Peanut episode for a good ten minutes, both of us being set off into peals of laughter with every comment we made about it. It took me quite awhile to finally figure out that Joel and I had attended a Pasadena Playhouse Christmas production of Miracle on 34th Street, staged like a classic radio show with the performers, including Alfred Molina and Peri Gilpin, standing in front of '40s-style microphones; a sound effects man equipped with all the usual accoutrements also on stage. It was such a fun event, and afterwards we had gone to an early dinner where Joel, dangerously, first tasted The Prisoner red wine. Unfortunately, my calendar squares are small so, for that day, all I could fit in was Miracle and the time of the show.

I am not a silly someone who laughs when a smile is sufficient. I am annoyed by people who laugh incessantly and too long when watching something humorous in a theater, causing you not to hear the following dialog as a result. People who use laughter as an automatic response to everything is puzzling to me. Ever had someone laugh when you switch subjects and tell them something sobering? It's weird. On the other hand, those times when you legitimately laugh until you cry are, as they say in the commercials, priceless. And perhaps all the more so during a pandemic when there isn't so much to laugh about, and you are not someone who is ever going to watch Schitt's Creek.

Lynnette and I have done this before, though usually when we are playing Ticket to Ride into the early morning hours and we are both punchy and stupid at a game which requires intelligence and organizational skills. We have never done it over the phone pouring over our calendars. I was reminded of a phone conversation long ago with a now-lost friend when we were watching Dumbo at the same time. That's my problem, I said, weepily. I didn't have a mother like Mrs. Jumbo.

Aside from the benefit of sharing the laughter, I came away from the conversation with a lesson learned. Miracles are in short supply these days. You never know when one might come again. So it's not such a bad idea that if you see one approaching, you get it down on your calendar, whether paper or virtual. You won't want to risk missing it. And make sure you get the time as well as the date. We never did find the date of the crab dinner, but that was ok. The next time we do it, it will get on our calendars. Something to look forward to until the next miracle comes along.