Losing touch with a friend is never fun. The long dormant pain that comes from not staying in touch can one day reemerge and stab you in the heart. Or the duodenum. But reconnecting with those friends can erase all of the pain. It’s sort of like wearing a dance belt. They’re painful as hell to wear but the relief from taking one off almost makes wearing one worth it. And yes, I did just liken friendship with wearing a dance belt.

I recently got in touch with my old friends John and Jeff. I hadn’t talked to John in about a decade, Jeff about two decades. Let me tell you, it’s not a good idea to go that long without talking.

This is how we fancied ourselves.

We all lived in Chicago a lifetime ago. John and I had worked at the McCarter Theatre and Jeff was the blossoming wunderkind of Chicago Theatre. We ended up forming an Equity Theatre Company. We spent a long night, dictionaries open, trying to come up with a name for the theatre. We ended up with Cypress Group.

The idea for the company was Jeff would write the plays, John would direct them and I would go get coffee for everyone.  I’m good at getting coffee. Just ask my friend Steve. He and I built the long gone Houseman Theatre on 42nd Street and nobody could go out and get muffins and coffee as well as me.

Anyway, the first show produced by the Cypress Group was Jeff’s play Coming Back, based Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 anti-war novel “Johnny Got His Gun.” We didn’t have a lot of money but we had a lot of heart, determination and mental inability. We built the set, rehearsed in apartments and pulled costumes from our closets. Basically it was our version of a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney film.

We rented the Eclipse Theatre and on opening night played to an enthusiastic handful of people. For the next week our audiences dwindled in size. I mean, family and friends can see the show only so many times. The first two Sundays, John and I stood outside the theatre, waiting to see if anyone – ANYONE – was coming to see the show. Both times the answer was no.

This is what we were really like.

Somehow we managed to get Richard Christiansen to come see the show. Richard was the leading critic for The Chicago Tribune and his word was all-powerful. If he liked your show you lived. If not, hello lions.

We were beyond excited and more than a bit scared out of our pants. I believe I had to change my pants several times that evening. John and I kept stealing glances his way, trying to read him, but Richard had a magnificent poker face.

And then it happened.

There we were, on the back page of the Chicago Tribune. For a theatre review in the Chicago Tribune, the back page was prime real estate, sort of like Broadway and Park Place in Monopoly. We were terrified to look at the review and then we read the first sentence –

“Coming Back,” a small but potent production that has been squeezed into the shoebox space of the Eclipse Theatre, is proof that poor theater need not be theater bereft of imagination.

From that moment on we sold out every performance. Each night we had a stand by list. People came from all over to see our show. It was an amazing moment that I have never forgotten.

Reconnecting with those two idiots after all these years has been great. We’ve all gone on to have families and careers (and we discovered only one of us is in the Baseball Hall of Fame). Talking to John and Jeff felt like all those years never happened. I guess that’s what happens when you lose touch with good friends. It’s like coming back* to something that was never gone.

*See what I did there? Coming Back was our first show. Friends coming back together. Huh? Huh?