When you’re sitting at midlife, or at some point after midlife, you look back a lot to when you were young. People have been doing this forever. I’ve been doing it a lot this week.

From about the age of 16 or so up until–well, up until the present, really–I wanted to be an actor of some kind. I didn’t just major in Dramatic Art at UNC Chapel Hill, I went for a B.F.A. in acting. After that I got an M.F.A. at the same school, then went with my new wife to New York City to be an actor.

The classic “between shows” job for New York actor is to wait tables in a restaurant. In the summer of 1977 I fulfilled this stereotype for about two and a half weeks by taking a waiting job at a place called La Pomme. This was a chi-chi little place in the east 60s that had an upscale clientele and served quasi-”natural” cuisine.

I only got assigned to lunch shifts, so I made little money. The real tip money was made by the dinner waiters. In my two weeks at La Pomme, I did wait on John Lennon once, and later on Bill Murray (just starting on Saturday Night Live). But I didn’t make enough in tips to make it worth staying.

Once I did get assigned to a dinner shift. Another young struggling actor was working that dinner shift as well, a guy from New Jersey named John Spencer.

We didn’t hang out or become buddies, really, but I do recall that John had a lot of confidence and a smiling demeanor. He smiled a lot, in fact. I recall that he was always nice and friendly to me at a time when I felt that other New York actors were out to beat me out of the next role. John had spent the previous summer as a bit player at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia (my wife’s hometown), and was now “between gigs,” so he was in the same position as I.

One evening I was supposed to meet my wife in the west 40s for some reason I can’t recall, and John lived in Manhattan Plaza, the high-rise apartment buildings for performers on West 43rd Street. So we shared a cab to the West Side after work. Later on I ran into John at a party thrown by some UNC buddies at Manhattan Plaza who had known him at Barter Theater, I think.

One of the treats of watching The West Wing for me the past few years has been to see the very good work by this actor with whom I was once acquainted. I knew John in the 1970s just enough to get a superficial impression. I never had any clue about his demons or secrets–I didn’t know until I read in Parade magazine, for example, that he was a recovering alcoholic (although in his early 30s I guess he did seem like a guy who liked to party). I knew he worked on L.A. Law in the 1980s, and I always perceived that as his “big break,” but I learn today from his obituary that he had been on The Patty Duke Show, a fluffy sitcom from 1963 in which Patty Duke played two roles.

The news of John’s death from a heart attack yesterday is making me feel very old. I guess it doesn’t surprise me. That character Leo McGarry on The West Wing had been looking pretty rundown for quite some time. The plot development which had Leo suffering a heart attack at Camp David was no surprise at all. Still, it is unsettling to see life imitate art–except John isn’t recovering from his heart attack like Leo did from his.

The news of John’s death comes two days after my father attended the funeral of one of his closest friends, Carl Kreps. Carl, who was a pastor in North Carolina, like my father, also had been in bad health for some time. My dad took it pretty hard. The year 2005 was a year of funerals for my dad. He lost an old friend back in the spring; his neighbor and friend, Conrad Williams, died in July; and his brother Paul died much too young and unexpectedly in August. And now Carl Kreps is gone, reminding my dad and me that we are all, basically, terminal patients.

I don’t know, really, what message or lesson to take from these two deaths this week. I guess I should make sure I keep myself in better shape. I live a much too sedentary life sitting at this computer and driving my car to the schools where I teach.

And I should always try to appreciate friends and acquaintances–even passing acquaintances like John Spencer.

Categories: midlife, performing, acting