She was a whirl of bright and extraordinary chaos. My god she loved Sondheim, with Jason Robert Brown’s musicals an extremely close second. She was an excellent pianist, far better than me, loud in the way musical theatre pianists can be. She told the most chaotic and elaborate lies about the most stupid things, you knew they were lies but it just didn’t matter.
The first time I went to New York I stayed with her, and she took me to a Jersey shopping mall to teach me about Mac makeup and how to curl my hair, all the things she thought I needed a remedial education in. She was younger than me, not by much, but enough to enjoy helping me in what felt like a teenage movie musical montage. She drove into Manhattan (it could have been for my benefit) and her car got impounded: I ended up bailing it out for her at the city pound (her dad paid me back the next morning).
I loved her. She was the least sensible person I could ever have come across. I’ll call her Jodie. For all the parts of Jodie, one of them was that she was dependent on alcohol and had been for most of her adult life.
She was full of trouble and sparkled like the light on water.
The very last time I saw her I was staying in a cheap hotel on East 51st, not far from Sondheim’s townhouse. I played it too cool to wander by the brownstone. I mean not that cool, since a) I knew where it was and b) I knew that the park Sondheim memorialised in Company was on the same street as my hotel. The park is a tiny oasis in the aggressive heat of the city. It’s really the absence of a building, a protected tiny square with a waterfall on one side, and some trees and plants, or as Sondheim painted it: ‘a little pocket park’. In Company it’s where Kathy takes Bobby to break up with him, to tell him she can’t continue living in the chaos of New York, she has to go back to something real upstate. It’s meant to symbolise everything that Bobby can’t be and Kathy is, in the city but not of it.
Jodie was in and of the city. If you could have zoomed into her DNA, woven into it would have been tiny decorative Empire State Building snow globes. For someone who I met maybe five, six times in my life, no more, she cut a shape in my heart. I think I fascinated her, with my Britishness. She called me Sar-Bear and there is no one before or since who I’d let get away with that. Maybe she loved me too.
The last time we met, we sat in the park and I had a coke, and she was thirsty so I offered her some, and she said she wasn’t drinking right now, she couldn’t have any. I was confused, it’s just coke, nothing added?
The gulf between the pain I knew it was possible to experience and the pain she had inside of her was suddenly out in front of us in this tiny glimmer of a place. She died a little while back, much loved by her family and her friends.
Sarah Whitfield 