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  • Method Acting
  • Kate Flaherty (bio)

When I saw the cast list for The Skin of Our Teeth posted outside the drama office, I thought, "I quit field hockey for this?" But I'd tried out for the high school play because I was tired of wind sprints and shin splints and sweating, because when I'd been in middle school, all too often sports was the only extracurricular option. Now that I was a freshman in high school, I would pursue an intellectual life instead. I signed up for German, I wrote for the school paper, and I indulged three other new loves: my boyfriend Troy, punk rock, and Shakespeare, especially Romeo and Juliet, which Mr. Whiting had just assigned in freshman English. I even had Juliet daydreams, starring myself as the tragic ingénue.

It helped that I had Troy to pine for since we were all too often apart. Troy wore thrift store shirts and took black-and-white photographs and had posters of Sid Vicious and the Clash on his wall. He lived ten miles away but might as well have been across the country since neither of us had a driver's license.

Gilford, New Hampshire, was small enough that I thought I already knew all the boys who needed knowing—especially since Troy was friends with my first boyfriend, Jeff, so it seemed as if I should have met him already. And while it may seem odd to date one boy and then his friend, this is the way of small towns. If small town girls never dated boys who were friends with each other, they'd run out of boys pretty quickly.

Troy and I had met in the summer at Gilford Old Home Day, a fair held every year in late August at the village field, where I'd discovered him hanging around the playground swing set with the older brother of a boy I knew from school. Troy, with his blonde crew cut and round, tortoise-shell glasses, his Converse and his Clash T-shirt from a silkscreen he'd made himself, was distinctive and cute in a skinny, bespectacled way I found wholly attractive.

In many respects Troy was like Jeff, who also was skinny and [End Page 141] bespectacled and obsessed with music, so maybe this was my type, but unlike Jeff, Troy didn't have a license. Having a car meant Jeff could be, and often had been, at my house in the drop of a hat, which meant we were physically together far more often than I could handle. I hadn't broken up with Jeff because I didn't like him; in fact the greater problem was that I liked him a lot, and his constant close proximity made me too nervous. A boyfriend like Troy, who couldn't drive and who lived too far away to bike, seemed much more manageable at the time.

Life with Troy consisted of those endless stretches of agonizing separation, punctuated by brief and thrilling meetings in the high school hallways or the few Saturdays my mom took me to his house or Troy's mom brought him to mine. On weekend nights when my parents were out, we'd stay on the phone deep into the night while my brother watched Twilight Zone reruns and Saturday Night Live and my grandmother went to bed early. Our phone conversations began respectably enough as Troy schooled me on bands I needed to listen to and records he'd tape for me, and then we talked about movies or friends or school before our conversations degenerated in a predictable and regular fashion.

"I wish I was there," I'd whisper.

"I wish you were here," Troy would answer.

"I can't wait to see you," I'd say.

"Me too," Troy would answer.

Whether I truly wished this or not might be called into question, but either way it felt like a meaningful and dramatic conversation. Our exchanges would usually continue until my grandmother, whose hearing was extrasensory, came downstairs to tell me to hang up and get to bed already. The one Saturday my parents were gone for the weekend and Gram...

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