Wendy Lady

It’s been nearly 4 years and I’m still not over Wendy Wasserstein’s death.

Strange, I know.

It’s not as though we ever met. We didn’t have a weekly, monthly or, hell, even annual date. It’s not as though October 22 rolls around every year and I think, “oh, Wendy and I would have been doing X today.”

Still, there’s a Wendy sized hole in my life.

I remember reading my first Wendy essay—Shiksa Goddess. I think, though I could be wrong, that the essay was published around the time Jamie Lee Curtis starred in the film version of the Heidi Chronicles. As an aside, I thought that the Heidi Chronicles was the true story of Heidi Fleiss. It’s not.

Anyway, she was just there. For about 13 years. I read her plays and her essays, bought her books. I grew up- graduated from college, moved abroad, fell in love, had my heart broken, fell in love again and had my heart broken (again) moved to New York, got a job, lost a job, got a new job and re-read her plays and essays. She was always there.

And then she wasn’t.

When she died her tributes spoke volumes, especially about her friendships. One woman commented that she was a “new friend,” she’d only known Wendy for 25 years. The quote that came up again and again was:

You can judge the quality of a woman by how long she keeps her friends

Well. I suppose you can. So Wendy died and I reached out to an old friend to whom I hadn’t spoken in years. Our mothers have been friends since the early 60s, we’d been very close and fallen out not with a bang but with a whimper. As chance would have it, she happened to be living at home for a year. So I called and we started talking and it was awkward at first but we got through it. And now she lives in New York and is an actress and we meet for brunch or movies or dinner or coffee or whatever and it occurs to me that we are now doing the sorts of things that Wendy’s characters were doing when I started reading her almost 20 years ago.

So I guess I’m sad because I won’t have Wendy to tell me how the story ends. Guess I’ll have to figure that one out on my own.