me: yep! in edinburgh with the family - it's gorgeous. and oh my god an oxtrad kid stopped me in the street! no clue what her name is...oops...
mike: i saw your mates romeo and mercutio at mccoy's again yesterday. plus today saw benvolio at the train station!
me: aww yay! romeo and mercutio have good taste in kebab vans, obviously.
back story: we took about 150 of our students to see romeo and juliet at a theater in oxford this summer - it was an outdoor amphitheater, gorgeous outside on the night i went, and a really well done performance. four or five of my friends and i went along to chaperone/see a performance for free. in the weeks that followed we kept seeing romeo and juliet and mercutio around town - they were spotted walking down broad street or at mccoy's, the kebab van that parks outside pembroke college every night from about 9pm-3am. i was really excited that they were friends in real life - i wanted romeo and mercutio to be friends in real life - but i was grumpy that everyone but me kept seeing them. and then one night i get a phone call from mike. he's whispering.
mike: romeo, juliet, and mercutio are at mccoy's right now.
me: ohmygod!
mike: if you run you might be able to see them - they're sitting on the curb and eating their food.
me: ohmygod! i'm on my way.
and then i ran through the streets of oxford from oriel college back towards pembroke and i pretended to just notice them as i was walking by and i chatted with romeo and it was fabulous. romeo made some comment to me that they don't always eat at mccoy's and if they did they'd be fat and the performance would be no good anymore. and now mike has seen them at mccoy's again. tsk tsk.
getting this text from mike kind of made my night, but i'm also sad that this story means nothing to anyone but me and about 6 of my coworkers from this summer...sad that this inside joke has to be explained to others. we had a lot of fun working together this summer, and i'll miss being around people that i shared this experience with. the inside jokes that come from shared experiences...the nicknames...the six, ten, and fifteen (oops, fourteen) man pyramids...the subsequent facebook banter. i'll miss the people and i'll miss the place. i'm hopeful that next summer will allow another trip back to oxford, and that my friends will return, as well. but i know, too, that it might not happen - that i have to be content with those moments and these memories and not look forward too much. (i'm a planner, though. this is hard for me...)
hooray for summers.
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