A Christmas Memory: Day Two -- The Ondines

When I was a young, young, young man I met my husband. We spent a year together in college and then we moved to Dallas. Almost immediately, we found an acting class with a wonderful man (one of the best teachers I had ever had) named Kyle MacClaran (I think that is how his name was spelled - my memory is getting soft); and almost immediately, Kyle asked me to play a part in his production of ONDINE (I was a replacement, actually).

Doing that play changed my life.

For, doing that play, I met this group of women who would, forever, be among my dearest friends. We are a family, really.

When the play ONDINE closed, we determined that we would always be together. We became a group that was called, in fact, The Ondines. The Ondines went to all of each others' plays, we went to parties together, ran around town together, spent countless hours on the phone together, knew each others' lives inside out -- it was not unlike the group relationships you see in tv shows like Sex and the City or Queer As Folk or Friends. We simply knew everything about each other. On birthdays we would arrange these elaborate kidnappings and parties.

And on holidays there would always be some kind of party.

Sometimes we would do sleepovers in each others' homes. Sometimes we would simply attend huge parties filled with the many friends we had in the local show business community. Sometimes we would get all dolled up (The Ondine women were famous for their fashion sense!) and go to the mall and see Santa. Our spouses would be involved at times but most of the time they preferred to leave the crazy Ondines to their own devices. It was a Utopian arrangement. We were filled with love and laughter.

Over the years, The Ondines have been separated by time and geography. There have been marriages, births and deaths. We gather together for reunions and we send each other emails and we write on each others' Facebook walls. If one of The Ondines is in a play when I go back to Dallas, I make every attempt to see that play (at times, traveling home JUST to see the play). We all have our own families (one of The Ondines has two grown sons, one has two daughters under 18, one has two sons under 18, one chose to have no children and one chose to make his friends his children) that are our main focus in life. But we are still a family.

The Christmases we spent together as young people created memories that live in my heart, indeed, my blood all the days of the year.

Family is whatever you make it... wherever people who share love come together and commune.