I'm not a big fan of musicals (excluding "Sound of Music", "My Fair Lady", "Mary Poppins" or any of the other musicals I grew up watching with my mom). As an actor, I avoided acting in them. My one turn in one was as Judas/John in Godspell. I hated the choreography so much that I decided it was my "character" to screw up every number. After that, I was done with them. However, I did go through a phase where I liked the music in Andrew Lloyd Weber's plays. Don't judge, I was young and ignorant.
In any case, there was one song from "Les Miserables" that really hit me in my clinically depressed, teenage angst sweet spot. Towards the end, Marius is bemoaning the death of all of his revolutionary friends, which in true ALW fashion, he does with the over the top melodramatic "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables". The last lines of that song always made me a little emotional (you can judge a little on that one, but again, I was young, ignorant AND clinically depressed, so cut me a little slack).
Marius sings:
Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will sing no more
I have no idea what it was about those lines that got me. I was a "cool" kid with plenty of friends and they were most certainly not "dead and gone". Yet, for some reason, something about the loneliness in the song resonated in a deep place.
Years later, I was again at the center of a cool kid crowd. Most every night, Sharon and I were hanging out with people we called friends, laughing, drinking, eating family style meals. We wondered how we had ever had fun without these people. We told ourselves we were lucky to have such great people around us. We thought we would all be friends forever. We were lying to ourselves. Overnight, it seemed (though in truth it had probably been a long time coming), it all imploded, becoming a blackhole that swallowed everything: the group dinners; the game nights; the laugh-filled nights. Before it devoured itself, that dying star almost took our marriage, as well.
Though I will always be sorry for the way it came to pass, there is no question the outcome was the best thing that could've happened. We had chosen our friends badly, and now they had been blown away like so much chaff.
So it is, that today I found myself in the backyard looking at empty chairs, thinking about "Les Miz" and Marius' cheesy song. Not because I was lonely and missing those people, but because I was glad that they weren't around to screw all of this peace up. I like the fact that, for the most part, no one sits in these chairs but Sharon and I. In my life, there has been noise and fun and revelrie. But there have been very few true friends. I love these empty chairs, because it seems to me like they're reserved for a VIP crowd of two. A place to have a cup of coffee or an afternoon beer. A spot to watch the last bit of light ebb from the day.
These empty chairs have seen a lot of the good life, without having to deal with a lot of the bullshit that often keeps the good life at bay.
None of this is to say I don't have any more friends. Throughout the last couple years, I have managed to keep a couple. Managed to make a couple more. I think Sharon and I would both welcome new friends to fill our chairs. They just have to be the right ones. They have to understand what this place means, and respect how hard we have worked to make it look like this...feel like this.
We must both be feeling optimistic about how many of those new friends are out there...because we just bought a BIG ASS TABLE!!!
