R2E #49*: Did Judi Bowker just flirt with me from the stage at the National Theatre in London?

And other examples of my potent imagination. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

THE ONLY TIME I SEEM TO HAVE BEEN HAPPY, IN LONDON, was when I was seated in the first three rows of the National Theatre, craning my neck up as England’s finest actors frisked about several feet from my nose. At that time the theatre had a policy to allocate the “worst” seats in the house—the spit-dappled first three rows—to anybody who would show up early on performance day and lay down £2 for a seat. 

I see from my ticket stubs (I saved them on my calendar) that I awoke before ticket time on November 4th, 7th, and 13th, and rode the Tube from my hostel (hostile) in Knightsbridge to the Embankment station. It spat me out on the east side of the Thames, so I could stroll through the Victoria gardens, then up onto Waterloo Bridge, which Monet painted forty times as the millennium turned (1800s to 1900s). 

The pollution (euphemized as “fog”) was so bad in Victorian times that you could scarcely see the Waterloo Bridge from the park where I walked. Monet himself occupied a room at the Savoy Hotel, where he worked on five paintings at once. Perfect for an impression, not so good on the lungs. The filtered light was the result of diesel fumes, which have been called the “biggest health catastrophe since the Black Death.”

So Monet suffered for his art, but with a really good attitude. “I cannot begin to describe a day as wonderful as this,” he wrote, on February 23rd, 1901. “One marvel after another, each lasting less than five minutes, it was enough to drive one mad.” 

Mad, we had in common. 

Based on one week of exposure, I decided that I loathed the English. OK, except for when Shakespeare, Shaw, and Bennet were supplying them with witty lines for actors to spit at me in the National Theatre. On my first night there I settled into seat C34, and absorbed Albert Finney as MacBeth. His explosive fricatives being what they were, they should have offered us ponchos.

I was transfixed by the three “wayward sisters” pulling portents from an enormous steaming kettle, including a babe from his mother’s womb, untimely ripped. It was squirming, bloody, and bawling, and might have made a more sensitive person second-guess parenthood.

I was so taken by the three witches' performances that I hung in anticipation of their curtain call, so I could leap from my seat in appreciation. Only, there was no bow for the harpies at the end, so I was forced to vent my enthusiasm on Albert Finney, who really didn’t need extra approval.

In the lobby after the show, I approached the lady manning the customer service desk, who was more accustomed to fielding inquiries about lost brollies. 

“Why didn’t the witches get a curtain call?” I confronted her, as if it had been her choice to throw a bushel basket over them. She looked me up and down over half glasses, thinking: Americans. Revolting, indeed. 

She said: “Well, they’ve probably gone home, haven’t they?” 

Maybe that’s why Londoners were so rude to me. I asked stupid questions in an impertinent manner.

The same week I attended a performance of William Congreve’s The Double Dealer, also in the Olivier Theatre at the National, again in the first row. There was no fourth wall here; I was practically on the stage. The better that I could engage in an eye-contact flirtation with Judi Bowker, the actress portraying Cynthia Plyant, a double-dealing heiress who is trying to choose among marriage prospects. 

In my journal—this is nonfiction people—I noted her “fleeting but penetrating gaze.” Yes. I believed she was flirting with me while holding down a starring role in a National Theatre play.

“I am convinced,” I wrote, “that she noticed me, as absurd as that sounds. Yes, convinced. And she was lovely, too.” I was not only on stage, but embraced there as well. It’s a form of mental illness, I’m certain. 

Oh, Judi Bowker. Had I thrown roses to you, would you have caught them? Allowed me to buy you a drink? IMDB informs me that she was born two years before I was; perhaps I might have played the ingenue to her courtesan. 

Alas, that was not included in my £2 stall seat.

*On alternating weeks (or, alternately, when the mood strikes) I run excerpts from The Road to Elsewhere, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. Or check out for my complete archive here.) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere. Then I went to England. Big mistake. But aren’t mistakes the first step on the road to elsewhere?