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Vaughn’s mother in a big-budget comedy called Beer Guys.

    Sean and I were Mentor and Mentee that summer. I was eighteen, he was twenty-seven. Sean taught me a lot about professional dignity. For example, this was when “call waiting” was new, and if you left Sean on the other line for more than ten seconds, he would hang up. And our show was a hit!
    On both nights! The cast party was in a backyard with paper lanterns. The cast and crew mingled. It was very glamorous.

    Summer Showtime alum Richard D’Attelis was there. My friend Vanessa had gone to her eighth-grade dance with Richard D’Attelis, and he had picked her up wearing a baseball shirt customized with an iron-on photo of Olivia Newton-John. It said “Olivia Newton-John” in puffy letters on the front and “Totally Hot!” on the back. Richard had been the first of the Showtime boys to quietly come out after his stint at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, an exclusive state-run arts intensive that might as well have been called the Pennsylvania Governor’s Blow Job Academy. Imagine a bunch of seventeen-year-old theater boys away from home for the first time for six weeks. They were living in empty college dorms, for the love of Mike! Literally! Think of the joy and freedom they must have felt, like being on an all-gay space station. (I’m sure there were one or two straight boys there, too, and I imagine they did incredibly well with the one or two straight girls.) Sean was flirting with Richard. We were seated at a picnic table at the party, and I realized they were playing footsie under the table. I could not contain my judgment. “What are you doing?” I demanded, trying to be funny and controlling at the same time. They ignored me. Richard got up to get a soda. I turned to Sean. “He’s so cheesy and gross!” My power-of-suggestion technique had worked so well when I was screwing over that blond girl. I used any ammunition I could muster. “He smokes, you know.” As the night wore on, I didn’t get the hint. I stayed at the table with two people who were clearly going to hook up. I tried some sarcastic eye contact as Richard told Sean about his dream to turn Xanadu into a stage play. Like that would ever work.

    In my mind, I was doing Sean a favor by trying to stop him from hooking up with someone regrettable. “Oh, my God. You know he’s only, like, twenty .” Sabotage and saying “like.” I was really in a bad place.

    Sean shot me a look. I was out of bounds. It’s one thing to be a wisecracking precocious teen hanging out with twenty-seven year olds. It’s another thing to get in the way of a grown man trying to get laid.

    I don’t know what happened between Richard and Sean that night, but the next day Sharon called me to say that Sean was very annoyed with the way I’d behaved. She said she had talked him down because “they all realized” that I had a crush on Sean. “It’s natural.” They all realized? They were all talking about what a baby I was and how I must have a crush on Sean? “I don’t.” I wept from sheer embarrassment. “I really don’t.” But the more I protested, the guiltier I seemed. And here, after twenty years, is the truth. I really didn’t have a crush on Sean. I had reacted that way because I viscerally felt that what they were about to do was icky. The stomachache I felt had nothing to do with a crush. I had to face the fact that I had been using my gay friends as props. They were always supposed to be funny and entertain me and praise me and listen to my problems, and their life was supposed to be a secret that no one wanted to hear about. I wanted them to stay in the “half closet.”

    Equity Actor Sean Kenny did not live in the half closet. He had moved away to New York and was just back for a visit. He was a grown man. My reaction to his hooking up with Richard D’Attelis made me feel like Coach Garth. I stroked my thick blond mustache and thunk about what I had