Many Best Friends SoGo Blog 1-17

[Stephanie]

Sooooo........

I have a lot of best friends. People tend to tease me about this habit. Some say you can only have 1 best friend. But my life has been so divided up into separate little chapters, that it's hard to pick just one. It's a little like trying to pick your favorite film or book character of all time. I mean, what kinda book are we talking about??? Biography? I'm a sucker for Edna St. Vincent Millay or Carson McCullers. Novel? The Spaulding brothers in Dandelion Wine. Or Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Or hell, I'm still a geek for Anne of Green Gables.

I can't pick. Same goes for my friends.

In 5th grade and middle school my best friend was Mary. She came from an uber religious family and was devastatingly smart. I liked her because she was so good and kind. We kept notebooks where we'd write each other letters in class.....these mainly consisted of me gushing about my one true love Larry, and Mary telling me how lame I sounded. After 8th grade, Mary went to private school so we drifted apart. But I still have the notebooks, some 15 years later.

Then I found the love of my life, Sarah B., in high school. She was the funniest, prettiest, most supportive girl I'd ever met. (Honestly, she sat through every bad play I ever did and always acted like it was the best thing she'd ever seen. She's a supreme liar.) Along with our other girlfriends Ashley, Tory and Erica, we were the Clean Teens........super squares who made good grades and would rather watch Empire Records in Ashley's basement than go to a - (gasp) - drinking party. To this day, this group is still my army. And when life gets tricky, I always end up running to Sarah.

After high school I moved to NYC. I was the only one from my school to head up to the big city, and I was wildly alone for about a year and a half.

And then I met James Ponsoldt.

I had signed up for an acting class down in the Village and was understandably intimidated to go on the first night. I had to do a much dreaded monologue as my initiation to the group. In the front row was a kind faced man who for whatever reason comforted me. Right away I knew this was a person who would be important. As fate should have it, we were paired up as scene partners at the end of class.

James was a Yale graduate and a grad student at Columbia. I was a college dropout working at MTV. Obviously I felt inferior. But as our rehearsals turned into a friendship, I found such support and inspiration from this person. For years after that class, my surrogate big brother and I would have 3 or 4 hour lunches where we'd talk about EVERYTHING. We didn't have any of the same friends, so our conversations were never about gossip. We talked about books and history and weird film and strange tidbits that fueled our creativity and curiosity for life.

We both laugh really loud and rant and go off on tangents and LOVE it.

James has always been one of the most inspirational people in my world. A few years ago he wrote and directed a movie called "Off The Black" with Nick Nolte. I remember when he was first coming up with the idea for it. We had just seen that Rob Zombie movie "House of a Thousand Corpses" and we were sitting in a strange little bar when James said "So, I think I wanna write a movie about a baseball ump." Cut to a year or two later and I'm crying as I visit his set, watching his dream come true.

Okay....the point of all of this babble is that James and I had lunch today and I can't tell you guys how heartwarming it was to see my "NYC Best Friend". Today we talked about cults and silent movie theaters, and creepy places to go in LA and diamonds (he just got engaged!!!). I came home so energized and proud of him. Currently, he's working on his next film, "Refresh, Refresh". He did exactly what we're doing here at Southern Gothic. He wrote the script based off of an award winning short story, and it has since been turned into a graphic novel that is getting stellar reviews.

Here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/Refresh-Danica.../dp/1596435224

This is a heartbreaking story that is going to be a beautiful movie, so everyone order the graphic novel to show support for the project. You're helping a visionary!

Since leaving NYC I have made more best friends in different places. And in my opinion, that doesn't diminish the importance of any of the friendships that came before. If your friend isn't "The Best" then what's the point??

And for the record, I do have the very best friends in the world. Wishing the same for all of you.
xo
hil

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