Falsettos

It was 1990. I'd met Mark in the spring. We volunteered together at the AIDS Action Committee, then met up at the AIDS Walk that year. He was sweet. He wanted to be friends. I cooked for him. We had adventures together. We were deeply romantic in that marvelously platonic kind of way.

One night, we went to dinner in the North End. At the end of our meal, a woman on the other side of the tiny but packed restaurant -- a woman who looked like she slept under bridges -- leaned back in her chair and sang O Sole Mio beautifully. We burst into applause, then paid our bill and strolled back along Beacon Hill in the fog, admiring the architecture.

Another time, I was going through a rough spot and Mark arranged a perfect evening with another friend -- appetizers at his house, dinner out, a stroll by the Public Garden afterwards, many laughs, just what the doctor ordered.

We had amazing evenings in Provincetown where his boyfriend, Michael, had a house. He told me stories of sailing off Santa Monica on elegant evenings. He reintroduced me to Bonnie Raitt.

By the time the autumn rolled around and his time in Boston was ending, I knew he'd come share Thanksgiving with my family in New York.

A friend had told me that I must see Falsettos by William Finn but didn't tell me what it was about. So we went. And I sat through my first Finn experience -- a cheerful nearly cartoony sung-through performance about a man who dies of AIDS.

We walked out of the theater into the Village unable to speak -- too much fear and horror hung between us. We just walked quietly for a little bit. Little did we know.

And then shouts, commotion, and a runaway horse went tearing by, clearly scared out of its mind. It was big. No one knew what to do until a man stepped out from the sidewalk and stood right in the horse's path. The horse stopped, that brave man took the reins, and held the horse until one very pissed off tiny policewoman came running through the crowd looking for her ride.

After that, the ice was broken. Such magic happened around that man.