Seeing 'A Streetcar Named Desire' With a Boy Who Used to Have a Crush on Me
Desire did not abound.
FRESHMAN YEAR OF LIFE
Your (un)definitive guide to the first year after graduation
The blind (me) will be leading the blind (you, if you’ve found yourself on this substack) in a series of conversations about being adults, kind of.
This all started at Nobu Downtown in the summer of 2023 (I hate that sentence as much as you do). My sweet and quiet friend from acting class- let’s call him David- texted me that his dad was in NYC and wanted to take him and a friend to dinner.
Great! My two favorite things: being liked by my friends’ parents and not paying for my own dinner. I was sold.
I met David on a street corner in FiDi, and we walked to meet his dad at “the restaurant” for “our meal.” “The restaurant” turned out to be Nobu, and “our meal” turned out to be omakase. “I” turned out to be so glad I said yes!
I couldn’t believe my luck. Not only was the dinner free, but the conversation was great, and the black miso cod was even better. So worth it.
Well, nothing in life is free. A couple of days after the dinner, I received a FaceTime from David inquiring about a “next date.” Phrases like “you’re a great guy,” “I value our friendship,” and “I’m not really sure it’s a date if your dad was there” flew out of my mouth at record speed.
Suffice it to say, Scene Study Workshop the next day was awkward.
Flash forward to present day- almost two years later- I receive the following text:
Hmm. Well on the one hand, I’ve been dying to see adorable Connell from Normal People playing an abusive Polish husband in 1940s New Orleans. On the other, I have about zero interest in rehashing whether or not it’s a date if a parent is present.
Eventually, I decided that I could have my cake and eat it too. So I responded the following:
I slept soundly that night, priding myself on my maturity and communication skills—until I woke up to the ‘Luke, I am your father’ of text replies. Against my wildest dreams, suddenly I was the presumptuous one:
As you can imagine, by the time I pulled up to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the 7:30 performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, I was feeling a tad unsure of myself. Did I really have that constricted a view of male-female friendships? Or was I just willing to cede being right for a free ticket to a Paul Mescal play?
As soon as I stepped into the lobby and saw David, however, I was flooded with happy memories from our acting class. We couldn’t stop gabbing all the way from the concession booth to our seats, covering everything from our craziest instructors to the most fun Shakespeare monologues, and every other topic that would make you pick up your laptop and move to a different seat if you were at a coffee shop seated next to us.
And now for my honest thoughts on A Streetcar Named Desire.
I remembered two things from reading Streetcar in high school.
“Stellaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!”
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” — Blanche DuBois
On #1, Paul Mescal absolutely delivered. If my name were Stella, I would have 100% recorded those 10 seconds on my phone, and then played them in perpetuity whenever I needed to hype myself up. Or, if I had a dog named Stella, I would use this whenever she was outside for too long and I needed to call her back into the house.
On #2, I was waiting with bated breath for this line the entire time, because not only do I feel it encapsulates the play, but I’m also eternally grateful to this reference for saving me during multiple college English classes. Every time we read a book about a fallen woman (which was all the time: Lily Bart in House of Mirth, Mona in Pola Oloixarac’s “Mona” (ok that one was a bit random)) I would pull out “I have always depended—” to the glee of my teachers and chagrin of my classmates who probably had something actually analytical to say. When the line finally came, it was frankly kind of anticlimactic, and if anything, chill.
(And now for a cheesy transition)
Much like reconnecting with David. David, if you see this, let’s do it again sometime.
And bring your dad- I miss him!