Missing My Mentors

I miss my mentors. I miss my old friends. As we get older, we will start losing people. Two of my mentors passed away last year — Le Wilhelm, who I loved with all my heart. He was so supportive of my work, and he was just such a heartfelt, real person. He produced my first play in NYC. But even when we weren’t working together, I enjoyed his Face Book political rants. He was very opinionated and Southern to his core. He was gay, but very Right and in the theater in New York….so he was pretty funny. I miss seeing those hilarious comments pop up on my feed. They made me smile. Carolyn French, who was an agent at the Fifi Oscard Agency also past away last year. I sat next to Carolyn when I worked at the agency and we became great friends. She begrudgingly became a fan of my playwriting too, even though she really wanted to me to become an agent. In fact, Carolyn invited someone very important to one of my plays years ago, and this person loved my play and invited me to “submit more material.” This was a TV executive. This was a very big deal. I wasn’t ready for TV at the time, so of course nothing more happened (mostly because of me)– but all these years later, this TV executive is back in contact with me again. Carlolyn was not my agent — and as I said, really didn’t give a hoot about my plays. But she saw my play, liked it and made a call for me. Perhaps it was “the” call of my life. Anyway, she’s been gone now for eight months. I think of her often. I still think that we will go meet up in Bryant Park for lunch, and I just miss her. A compliment from Carolyn or Le meant the world to me for different reasons, but the same reasons. One of the last things Carolyn ever said to me was to tell me that she thought I was a wonderful mother. I brought baby Maya to see her one day, now four summers ago and she couldn’t get over the change in me: “Oh Laura, you’ve found yourself. Just look at you.” Of course, this was both pleasing and frustrating to me as you can imagine. “No, no, no…I’m more than a mom. Ugh. This mom-thing isn’t finding myself, ” I thought to myself. But maybe, what Carolyn and others were seeing in me was a Zen that rises up within us as mothers. We are bigger than anything else, even our own ambitions in that moment. We are mothers.