A Love Note to Heather, for Her Birthday
I always wanted a sister. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined such a glorious answer to that wish as I found in my dearest friend, my incomparable co-creator and lifelong muse, Heather. This past weekend was her birthday, and if you have ever had the pleasure of spending time in her company, you will have no doubt that she is the type of woman for which epic poems and heart-wrenching love songs are composed. So here, in our brand new sacred, shared creative space, I would like to take this opportunity to do just that: to express what an absolute honor and privilege it is to know her. Because if ever it has been said, to know her is truly to love her. Heather is a beautiful human being, inside and out. She is feminine grace personified, a temple of knowledge, practically perfect in every way. She has a Midas touch in her incredible gift of improving everything she touches, from the impeccably decorated, magazine-worthy spaces she lives in, to the friendships she treats with such tender dedication. I am profoundly grateful that we found each other. My heart-stopping, breathtaking, show-stopping best friend.
From the moment we met, we were inseparable. Together with the third of our little trio, Tizzy, we were complete and entirely inviolable. The rest of the world existed outside of our sphere. There were other friends and responsibilities but they were all characters in a moving scape of impermanence. We were a constant. It was because of our friendship that I joined the choir, and spent hours of my day singing. It was Heather, or rather her father, Derek, who drove us to what was my first real theater audition, after which Heather and I treated him to an unaccompanied, boisterous, a Capella version of some of the full-cast songs in RENT. As a parent now, I am positive he was both very much amused and also very tired of us by the time we got home and I don’t blame him one bit. Auditory torture of Heather’s sweet fathers aside, it meant so much to me to see how much her parents truly supported her love of theater and knew it called her like a siren’s song.
In fact, although I did not realize or properly appreciate it at the time, Heather gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life when she introduced me to her love of musical theater. I was stubborn and filled with an enormous amount of musical prejudice, considering I was all of fourteen when we met and had been raised with very little exposure to pop culture. Yet, ever-tolerant of our rare incongruities, Heather serenely continued being herself and loving the things she loves. To this day, it is this genuine expression of herself, radiating like full moon light on still water that is so sweetly intoxicating about my friend and eventually her passion for the stories expressed so perfectly in song caught hold of me. I was swept away into a romantic subculture unlike anything I had experienced before: musical theater. Here it was, the place to explore the many facets of performer and performance, to express oneself vocally, musically, physically. And my friend already knew that this deeply magical place existed, and that she – we?- belonged there! It was like being handed a key to a secret door by the fairy princess herself. Heather is also immensely talented. Her voice is gorgeous, powerful and well-trained, as capable of bringing an audience to tears with a gentle soprano as she is capable of belting an ovation-inducing showstopper. She is a disciplined and hardworking actor who engages in character work with focus and drive, uncannily embodying each role she plays with determined precision. There is nothing like it. There is no one like her.
Heather is brilliant, her retention of information astounding. She is, by far, the fastest reader I know. In high school, after waiting until midnight for the release of certain very popular magical books, we would rush home to read them, often staying up most of the night. Heather would always be close to finishing by morning, and still be ready to discuss the content in detail. After college, we became roommates and I fondly remember sitting in our little blue house covered in morning glories, listening with rapt attention as Heather animatedly divulged all of Henry VIII’s most horrifyingly gruesome secrets in utter detail. Never was there a more thrilling history lesson. She has always been one of my favorite people to pass the time with. We could sit together for hours on the green, Craigslist couch we bought from someone for $100, and create elaborate evacuation plans to be executed in the event of a zombie apocalypse. It was the early 2000s so, clearly, they stole all those show ideas from us…
Heather has always been an amazingly supportive and accepting person in my life. She is the woman I aspire to be. She has laughed with me until we couldn’t breathe and held me when I felt like I would completely collapse in on myself like a dying star. Soon after I became a mother, Heather and her future husband, Travis, moved in next door. Not only did I get to live next door to my best friend again, but my little son had the incredible gift of living next door to his sweet Auntie Heather. A little over two years later, I was a very moved bridesmaid, and my son, Alako, was a tiny attendant in Auntie Heather’s exquisite wedding to Uncle Travis.
Several years after that, when Heather became a mother herself, I was awed by how well she adapted to this challenging, intense, and excruciatingly beautiful new role. Heather is an incredibly loving and devoted mother. True to form, my brilliant friend approached her new role with the same care and precision she had approached her roles with in the past, although now she was functioning with considerably less sleep. I have always felt that Heather is great at recognizing her needs and her boundaries, and motherhood is no exception. Rather than allowing herself to be swept away in the current of parenthood, Heather compassionately determined the best way to be the very best mama while also managing to sustain the creative fire in her heart. Even as the current picked up with the addition of her second glorious son and later with her adorable twin daughters, Heather’s passion for artistic expression and recognition of her personal needs remains true, and a constant source of inspiration to me.
Over twenty years of friendship and we now live farther apart than we ever have before. And yet my radiant friend is as much a part of my daily life as the sunshine in California. Our inside jokes, favorite song lyrics, and personal references are scattered everywhere around me like glitter. And my darling Heather, my chosen sister, remains as effortlessly stunning and refreshing as the new day: full of infinite potential, nurturing, creating, and shining on everything in her proximity, enhancing the glory of the world simply by being such a wonderful, incomparable part of it. I love her with my whole heart and wish her the most joyous solar return. Please join me in wishing Heather a Happy, albeit slightly belated, Birthday!!!
