As a reader of our blog, you would know that David and I have been "apart" whilst he has been on his European casting tour and I have been working on the Dutch casting and now the London re-cast. Strangely enough, a lot of people, from my friends back in the US to my colleagues here in London, have expressed their sympathy for me that "it must be hard for you and David to be apart so much."
Which is interesting -- do I show it in my face, I wonder, or in the tone of my emails or even blogs? Most likely. And it is true, it never gets easier being apart, especially when we married each other so that we could be together, after having spent months apart halfway around the world. But what's interesting about this sudden spurt of sympathy toward our being "apart" is that... well, we haven't been apart in some time, given our industry standards, and I have been feeling like we have gotten quite soft and wimpy about it all, missing each other when we have, in fact, managed to see each other every weekend since David's European casting tour began.
Don't get me wrong -- I say again, it's never easy to be apart. But I also have no illusions about how great we have had it, and hopefully, crossing our fingers and surviving being-apart-dom here and there, we shall. For a long while, whether its Hamburg or London or trips to Toronto or Amsterdam, David and I have managed to stick together as life partners as well as work colleagues. We have come into ourselves as a couple who can work and travel and live together. We work with colleagues whose partners are back home, who miss their families all the time. When working on the same production/territory, we get to travel together as well as work together -- we see each other a lot! And it's funny that after having been apart in more severe ways, this is the time when people seem to notice that we are apart. I guess that reflects how our colleagues and friends have become accustomed to seeing us together -- so when seeing one of us without the other, the physical, presence "lack" of The Other Half grows more poignant for third parties.
In reality, I think we might spend more time together than most couples who don't travel as much as we do for their jobs, since we live and work together closely.
The hard part is, indeed, coming up: when David works in London for the re-cast rehearsals and I will be in Toronto. But somehow, we shall manage. It's not simple, and not without the domestic negotiations that might happen within any household -- only for us, sometimes they must be conducted across countries or even continents, over time differences.
After being apart from each other due to the show for months at a time, we were, in many ways, desperate to log in as much time together as possible. Luckily, this feeling of wanting to spend as much time with each other as possible has not dwindled. But I find that we have gotten a bit better about being apart, and are learning each day how to prioritize our life together, not let work and other "stuff" distract us from what is truly important -- each other. We are constantly learning about communication, and empowering ourselves to make decisions that best put our life together forward -- like when David flew in from Stockholm to be with me in London, even if it meant waking up at an ungodly hour to fly to casting in Vienna on Monday, because I needed him.
Dirty Dancing is such an ever-expanding enterprise, it is often easy to get consumed by it or feel overwhelmed, especially when both parties in a couple are working on it. But we have learned a lot from it, gained a lot from it, and are always evolving with each other, inspired by the often unusual or literally foreign circumstances thrown in our way.
We do miss each other, and it would always be better to be together. But it is funny these days when people express lovely sympathy for our being apart. I remember when I used to feel sorry for myself for not having my love right by me all the time. These days, while I miss David, I know I will speak to him a hundred times that day and grow abreast of each other, and that, in the end, we are always just a flight apart -- and I am proud of how we have each come along in our part with this show that we may, sometimes, be apart, but this is only because we have become legitimate players in it. And this is a nice feeling.
No comments:
Post a Comment