Tea, Sympathy, Shame, Princess Di

Eleven years ago I played the Deborah Kerr part in a mostly cross-dressed, gender-bending San Francisco community theater production of Tea and Sympathy.* We did a two week run at Luna Sea, and on closing night, someone came backstage at intermission and breathlessly informed us that Princess Di had just been killed in a car accident. The accident happened just after midnight on the 31st in Paris, so we would have been hearing about it around 9 pm on the 30th, a Saturday night.

Was the news a shock? Can I blame the death of Princess Di on the fact that I went back out on stage and promptly forgot a section of my lines in the second half, desperately improvising for a few minutes, and slightly muddling up the blocking? I've had shame about messing up closing night for a long time, and although I haven't watched the film since then, when I saw this morning that today marks the anniversary of Di's crash, I promptly looked up the famous last scene on Youtube. It made me cry.





In the play, she's actually up in his room, sitting on the edge of his bed, and as she utters the famous "Years from now-- when you talk about this--" line, she's unbuttoning her blouse rather scandalously.

* From the original script:
"Tea and Sympathy is the story of a lonely and misunderstood youth who, because he has artistic sensibilities and has played women's parts in amateur theatricals, is wrongly suspected of homosexual tendencies. Although the master in whose house he rooms is one of his chief persecutors, the wife of the teacher is kind and understanding as well as beautiful. The play is pretty specific about the physical aspects of the resulting relationship, but it handles it with taste, delicacy and considerable skill."