I couldn’t afford the tickets on my waitress salary, so I went to the theater early with my friend Ginny and waited for the raffle. If we won, we would get front row seats to Rent for $20 each. This was back in 1998. The musical had been a hit on Broadway, and now it was touring in Omaha, Nebraska. The Orpheum was packed with people, many of them kids like ourselves. Ginny and I had dressed up for the occasion in long skirts and vintage blouses, bright scarves wound round our heads, and our hair in messy buns. I’m sure we had smoked a bowl before catching a ride downtown from our friend who was delivering pizzas for Dominos. He only had twenty minutes to get the pizza to the house, so he dropped us several blocks from the theater, and we walked down Dodge.
It was a nice day, I remember that. Spring was just starting to come to the Midwest, and the snow piles were few and far between. Ginny and I didn’t talk about what we would do if we didn’t get the tickets, how we would get back to our UNO dorm, four miles away. We would walk, I suppose. Probably stop in Dundee for a drink or two.
We rubbed the orange tickets between our fingers until the paper started to flake off in our palms. Only one of us had to win—the raffle was for two tickets—and when the man got up in front of the crowd and said he was going to start the drawing, I held my breath.
I was a psychology major at that time, but secretly, I wanted to be a song writer. I had bought myself a used acoustic guitar with a couple hundred dollars I’d gotten when my grandpa died, and I was teaching myself to play from videos I found on the internet. I wasn’t very good yet, but I liked writing the lyrics. When the man read off the numbers, Ginny’s fingers encircled my bare arm—That’s me! she cried out, jumping up and down, I won!—and even though they hadn’t won, everyone else in the theater cheered.
Ginny handed over a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and I counted out twenty ones—tips from my shift the night before.
We had two hours before the show, so we decided to go to a bar in The Old Market that wasn’t so fussy about IDs. Ordered vodka cranberries—that’s all we ever ordered then, not being seasoned drinkers.
High on the drinks and the weed and the thrill of anticipation, we got pretty animated there in that booth, attracting a couple guys. They had dark hair styled like Connor Oberst and wore Cursive t-shirts. They bought us more drinks. One of them, the more innocent looking of the two, sat close to me in the booth, his thigh pressed up against mine, and as we sat there, his hand fell on my knee. I could see in his eyes that he wanted to kiss me, and if I didn’t have other plans, I would have let him.
Oh fuck! Ginny said, the show starts in fifteen minutes!
We left, not bothering to pay for our first drinks. Ran the seven blocks to the theater. We made it to our seats just as the curtain opened. We were first row center, and by intermission Ginny was passed out in her seat.
I sat there in awe of how someone could write songs that called to my soul. I wanted to be that. But I wasn’t.
After playing a couple open mics, I ended up selling my guitar for money to spend on study abroad. When I returned from Europe, I bummed around Omaha waiting tables for a few years, then followed a boyfriend to Chicago, where I eventually got a job as an administrative assistant.
The other day there was a post on Facebook that Ginny had died suddenly of a brain aneurism. She left behind a husband and two kids—young boys. Someone had posted photos of the family together sitting on a beach. They looked so happy.
We hadn’t talked in a while. By the time I had gotten back from Europe Ginny had already left Omaha. We’d sent each other a message here or there, then we sort of lost touch. But when I saw that she had passed, I was filled up with an overwhelming sadness. I thought of that moment of excitement when she won the lottery. Her hand gripping my arm. The two of us jumping up and down. In pure joy.
This a lovely story. Thank you!
Being from the area you talk about it's fun to read of places I know.