My best friend will probably kill me for this, but…
Speaking of fat… Lisa finally dropped all the baby weight and looks terrific. She says that “High School Reunion” is the best diet she’s ever gone on. She thinks we should have one every year.
She also thinks she should play matchmaker to get Heather Ferrante and Mike Sargento back together. Sarge got divorced a few years back and Heather came here alone. She looks fantastic, and I’m pretty sure he’s already noticed. Those two haven’t left the dance floor all night. I think Lisa’s meddling may be thwarted once again, because it looks as though those two are reuniting just fine on their own.
Even still, Lisa has Pick making arrangements for us all to go to a Knicks game this winter as his guests. It should be a blast.
It’s good to have old friends.
Speaking of old friends… Trip is currently in cahoots with Miramax to direct his next movie. With all that obsessive attention to detail, I don’t foresee any issue with a transition from working in front of the camera to being behind it. I don’t think he’ll ever give up acting, but for now, this is the avenue he’s choosing to pursue. He’s really excited about it.
The Jenna/Bert movie got shelved once Trip turned down the role. At first, I thought he was trying to appease me, and I found myself in the unfathomable position of trying to convince him to take the part. If the script was as great as he claimed, I didn’t want him to miss out. That show of trust earned me an appreciative grin, his astounded gratitude, and a sound tongue-lashing (the good kind this time). Ultimately, though, the decision to bail on the project was made on his own. He finally realized that the idea of working with his ex-fiancée and The Lizard Perv simply turned his stomach, and didn’t want to deal with their pain-in-the-ass personalities over the many months of filming. No script was worth putting up with that.
Slap Shot came out late last fall. It gave good box office, but it wasn’t the kind of film to get nominated for a ton of awards. But that’s okay. Trip was never in it for the accolades.
Speaking of accolades… I’d finally met Paul Newman at the premiere. When Trip introduced us, Paul kissed my knuckles, gave Trip a wink, and told him, “This one’s a keeper.”
I almost died. It seriously has gone down in the history books as one of the (many) highlights of my life.
Almost anytime Trip and I find ourselves getting into a pointless argument, one of us will remember to defuse the situation with our adopted truce phrase, “What would Paul do?”
It may sound stupid, but it works for us.
Trip’s foundation had been doing really well already, but the buzz has really picked up since that CNN interview. When Hurricane Katrina hit, Trip was one of the first celebrities to speak out about how poorly the residents had been treated, and his organization soon partnered with the American Red Cross to aid in the disaster recovery. Not long after, my cousin and my brother got on board, and arranged for ERF to team with Habitat for Humanity to start the rebuild. With Jack and Bruce leading the project, Trip’s foundation has been responsible for over twenty new houses in the New Orleans area this past year alone.
The collaborations with such like-minded organizations have been ongoing.
Trip took me with him on a couple visits to Africa. He’d been all over the continent as a teenager during his globetrotting phase, and never forgot the conditions in some of the countries there. We’re currently in talks with UNICEF, putting the funds together to build a school in Uganda. I joked and suggested we name it St. Norman’s.
Speaking of our alma mater… Our former classmates have been going a little gaga over him all night. People he’d never spoken a word to back in school are suddenly bringing their spouses over to be introduced to their “old friend Trip”. As always, he’s been able to handle all the attention with his usual charm.
I took a break from dancing to come and check out all the pictures on the wall. Carolee Simcox chaired the reunion committee, and I guess she and her fellow rah-rahs thought it would be a great idea to blow up a bunch of shots from our yearbook and plaster them all over the reception room. It really was a great idea.
Not.
I’d forgotten how huge our hair really was in the eighties and early nineties. I guess that was the general idea behind hanging all these pictures. It’s important to remember history so that we’re not doomed to repeat it.
There’s one shot in particular that caught my attention, however, and I’ve been standing here staring at it for a solid five minutes, now. It’s a huge poster-sized picture of Trip from Guys and Dolls. He’s leaning against a brick wall with his arms crossed against his chest, a fedora dipped precariously over one of his smiling, blue eyes.
God. I didn’t just imagine it. He really was Golden Boy.