A beautiful day I hadn’t realized I needed, or: Recharging with Armitage and friends

A fellow Richard Armitage fan was visiting my neck of the woods this week in order to support a friend whose son is getting married tomorrow. ‘Twas our beloved sister, Kathy Jones, poet and fangirl — the woman with a couplet or a limerick to mark every occasion! And she sent me an email and suggest that we meet. How could I resist? For me, despite my hesitance to meet fans in person, this was an offer that came just at the right time. This was the first EVER paid vacation day I’ve used in my life. I don’t think Kathy knew that, but it was kind of momentous for me for that reason alone. (I had to figure out how to use the computer system for that! And OMG an employer-sanctioned day off work! While everyone else was sitting behind their desks struggling with D/F reports!) But beyond that, Kathy is simply a lot of fun while not being only a lot of fun — a great combination of laugh-provoking and thought-provoking. I like to laugh and I don’t do enough of it, and Kathy is both lighthearted and versatile of conversation. I’m one of those people who always knows what time it is — and yet, somehow, I completely forgot the time while she and I were talking. We sat at lunch for three hours without me noticing the hour!

The bridge I drove over in order to visit Kathy Jones.

We had talked a bit on the phone the day before, and I had ventured a little bit about my reservations — I think, in my mind, Kathy is really one of the cool kids, and I am not. I think that I am in person not all that much like Servetus (or Servetus is a version of me that is more appropriate for the blog than for real life, someone who puts herself together only with the power of words and isn’t undercut by the other aspects of her persona), and that I don’t want to disappoint. Kathy is, in contrast, not what one expects in a fan, but as I write that I wonder what I mean. I think it’s that with fans, one expects a certain preoccupied quality. But Kathy’s focused without being geeky or nerdy in the slightest. She really is the girl you want to sit next to in class because she’s together and knows what’s going on, but she’s also giving off a stream of amused commentary at the same time. She’s the one you want to be sharing your tent with on the Girl Scout camp out because she knows how to get it pitched but she won’t laugh at you if you don’t. Or, if she does, she’ll be laughing with you because she would think it was funny if the tent pole caught her on the nose.

But you know? In the end I wouldn’t have cared even if we hadn’t hit it off, because she played an instrumental role in my decision to see The Crucible after all — she sent me an email to tell me to throw caution to the winds, for once Servetus throw caution to the winds — and even though I didn’t admit it to her until afterwards, I thought for a long time about what she said and it influenced me.

She greeted me in the parking lot of her “resort” (we joked about what kind of facility passes for a “resort” in Florida), gave me a quick hug, and said, “see, I really am tall!” And she is — tall, tan, relaxed, a little bit effusive and, I might add, the perfect hostess. I spend all my days inside a freezing, windowless building, and so when she asked if I wanted to stay outside or go into her resort room, I promptly replied that I would love to stay outside as long as didn’t sit directly in the sun. I admit that I was a little nervous about that — Kathy is really, really tan and I am really, really pale, and I admit that given the number of people I know with skin cancer around here, I avoid the sun like the plague. She was totally up for it — so much so, though, that I think she ignored her own need for the air conditioning (it was 92 out at midday in all our Florida humidity) in order to please me. We sat outside under an umbrella and watched other people swim. She also assured me that if I spent a week with her, she could get me over my water fear!

Kathy Jones is, when one meets her: immediately disarming. She does not apologize for who she is, and that made it easy for me to be the same way. I knew I would like her the second she said “by the way, I swear a lot.” Also sympathetic: she doesn’t like making party favors for weddings. A further point in her favor: she thinks Florida is TOO HOT.

We talked about everything — of course, I knew much less about her than she did about me — and I got to hear about her kids and their activities, Mr. Jones (who was out fishing — damn, I knew I should have brought dad with me), and her other fan meetups (she’s met mimicruz and miapatagonia and Guylty) and in general, her impressions of the fandom. We talked about so many of the big questions — will we ever get to see Urban and the Shed Crew? If we don’t, what does that say about the quality of the project and its result? Are we going to like Hannibal? Will it give Richard Armitage the exposure we hope for? How “big” do we really want Richard Armitage to be? Do we want him to play Bond? What about Sleepwalker? How will we see it? What kind of theater is going to show Pilgrimage in the U.S.? And of course, the news about Clearance (what is it with these one word titles?) was only hours at that point, so we chatted a little about that, too. Naturally, we talked about some of those neuralgic points that it’s risky to raise in public discussion, because that’s the best part of the one-on-one aspect of fangirling, and one of the things I enjoy most about a fan meetup — the possibility of being really open in a way that I no longer am on email. We gossiped a bit.

After two hours under the umbrella, Kathy politely moved me on to lunch — her treat. (She’s also generous, in ways that one sees, but also in many ways that one does not immediately recognize.) I was enjoying myself so much that I hadn’t noticed time passing. We took a sort of comical and superfluous ride in my un-air-conditioned car (sorry about that, Kathy! But I’m still grateful I found my nametag!) to a nearby restaurant with a beautiful sea view and had a weird miscommunication with the hostess, such that we ended up outside again. I think Kathy wanted to be inside but was too polite to say. Kathy had a turkey Cobb salad and I had lightly blackened shrimp bedded on a lemony sauce with some very good French fries. She downed a few Diet Cokes while I mainlined some very un-Southern unsweetened ice tea. (Thanks again for lunch, Kathy!) And we talked, and talked, and talked, about everything — teaching at different universities, the appropriate water temperature for diving, how tall is “too tall,” working in journalism, what the appropriate age for marriage was when she was a girl, what her mother was like and whether her son will ever get married (great joke about creating dating websites for people who’d rather not be in a relationship), how much money one needs to be earning to be satisfied with one’s life, and so on. I think our politics might not be very similar but it didn’t seem to matter. At some point it occurred to me, finally, to ask how old she was and she said, simply, “I don’t want to say, but I could be your mother,” and I felt a sort of comfort in that, in a way that briefly surprised me. In any case, she looks quite a bit younger than my mother did — probably the result of a very athletic youth but also the desire to stay young. She smiles a lot and it shows.

My favorite parts of the conversation, apart from getting acquainted with someone I “know” very well in a rather limited way, though, involved our discussions about Richard Armitage and what he, and the fandom around him, has ended up meaning to us. It wasn’t, I think, that neither of us has thought about these things, or that neither of us has ever said these things before. She showed me pictures and cell phone vids of her experiences at the L.A. premiere of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and told me what the gentlemen were like, and we compared notes about Richard Armitage at the stage door of the Old Vic after The Crucible. I think these are the most important stories, and I don’t think we tell them, retell them enough: about how something about watching Richard Armitage, meeting Richard Armitage, however, briefly, what we saw, what we experienced, changed our lives. She had examples; I have examples. There’s something about the joy of those experiences that makes it okay to talk about the (problematic) circumstances that both sparked the changes and made the changes desirable. Armitage makes it okay. It’s not just the joy of being able to squeee with someone who understands, although that is part of it. It is finally being able to talk about something important, perhaps the momentarily most important thing. And we can only do this with people who really understand what it’s about.

Kathy Jones — is one of these people.

So, after she left me talk for three hours, she pointed out that it was 4:30! She needed to get to her wedding shower. I needed to get on the road before the all-afternoonly squall.

I drove home over this bridge. Very grateful.

Sunshine Skyway Bridge. How I got home.

~ by Servetus on May 16, 2015.