Phantom Call

Back in high school, a time before cell phones and constant communication, I was in a play at the local theater called Scapino. Unlike a school production this was a professional theater with two stages and our run was six weeks not one weekend. Pretty cool. Because we had so many shows over an extended period(and the fact I had a supporting part) there was a lot of down time. During that production I taught myself to juggle(with left over limes from our opening night party), read, explored, and made prank phone calls.

Now my calls weren't malicious I just called random numbers and tried to engage people in conversation. Ask them how they were, what they were up to, if they had seen O' Brother Where Art Thou?. During my random dialing I found a woman's work voice mail, because our shows were always outside normal work hours I was confident she would never answer so I started leaving her messages. From what I remember they were relatively innocuous. I'd wish her well maybe tell her some interesting thing I'd seen or read, maybe share some piece of personal information like I thought this or that park was really great for hiking. I left probably half a dozen messages or so over the course of a couple weeks and they got increasingly more introspective. I'd ask her if she was happy, try to figure out if I was, that sort of thing. 

One of our last shows I called the number and someone answered. It wasn't the woman it was one of her co-workers that had to come in on the weekend to pick something up. The first thing she asked me was "Are you him?" worried I might be in trouble I reluctantly said I was. She told me the woman would be crushed that she had missed me, that the whole office was intrigued by the mystery, and that the woman herself seemed to be touched by my messages. I said I was sorry to missed her and quickly said goodbye. The show closed and the next time I was out and by a payphone I found I had forgotten the number.

It was a nice cool thing. Kind of reaching out and connecting sight unseen. With the pervasiveness of cell phones, the extinction of the pay phone, and the slow decline of privacy and anonymity(and by extension mystery) this situation would be impossible in this day and age. The challenge then is to find ways to connect, find ways to be kind, despite the impersonal and acidic illusion of connection that social medial and the internet provide. Not to say the past was better or easy but there are different issues that the technological necessity has uncovered, some of which we have yet to address.